Customer Street Improvements

We have been working on a tool at CustomerStreet.com to track where how the web sites we build for our customers, our directories; UFindUs, SmileLocal, MoreUK and trade specific directories get found on the major search engines.

Sharon Odom-Fling is a Local Internet Marketing Expert and has written an interesting article on Internet Based Moms about how the web works for local business.

For any business to be found on the web it needs a a presence. A Customer Street Package offers excellent value by giving the business a basic website that is designed to be found by the search engines, listings on UFindUs, SmileLocal, MoreUK and a trade specific directory which also get found by the search engines and a tool so that they can edit their website and add to it. Stuart Forrest my boss wrote about how much traffic we get our customers in his posting “Traffic Aggregation is what Customer Street is about”.

Lee Johnson the CustomerStreet.com Search Engineering Manager has uncovered an interesting article that describes Google’s secondary indexing process. Essential Google is always looking for new sites and new content Everflux and the Freshbot describe a process and a tool that enables that to happen.

Read Lee’s article here.

I took the week off after Easter to spend some time relaxing and walking in the Cotswolds. Six nights were spent at the the very hospitable Wheatsheaf Hotel in the delightful market town of Northleach. The final night was spent in the very pretty village of Lower Slaughter at the luxurious Washbourne Court. Each night my companion and I dined at a different restaurant the best being the Angel at Burford. There were two restaurants that were not great and there aspects about the accommodation that could have better in both places but overall they both lovely if very different places to stay.

My dilemma is where to post this valuable first hand experience of staying and eating at these venues? We haven’t put the ability to review any of the services offered by people who advertise in the CustomerStreet.com trade directories or in UFindUs.com, SmileLocal.com or MoreUK.com. There are sites where customers can review the service they have received the big question is whether any value would be added by having a review section in the Customer Street directories?

Earlier this week I took part in a four hour meeting at our Customer Street head office to discuss how we can better report on our key business data.

There were several key issues:

• We already have a lot of reports and reporting available to us is it understood?
• We have disparate sources of data. How could it serve the organisation better if we could combine it into usable forms?
• How can we make the business KPI’s understood by all staff?
• Can the reporting focus on measuring KPI’s down to an individual staff level where appropriate?
• How best can we give the Customer Street managers easy access to the information they need to manage in a live format and also by mail/internet?
• How can we use our information to help our staff assess their performance against their KPI’s on a daily basis.
• How do we make a report meaningful for the recipient?