It’s always an interesting time when people get in the festive mood, drinks flow, and wallets open. Even with talk of a recession, we’re seeing signs of a strong ecommerce christmas ahead of us.

eConsultancy recently published their own thoughts on the christmas season spending by predicting that nearly 50% of all customers planned to do the majority of their christmas spending the January sales and 39% will spend less this year. This seems to indicate to me that people will still be sending but looking to find some deals to save money at the same time.

As always, shopping online and comparing prices is the perfect way to do this and I think we’ll see a strong sales growth still for the online retailers this christmas.

Looking over at our friends across the pond, their CyberMonday data published on SFGate explained that more people had shopped compared with 2008 but they were all indeed spending a bit less.

So, just a sign of the times I guess, people looking for discounts, deals, voucher codes, cash back, and willing to spend less overall.

There have been some great responses to the seedcamp post I did a week or so ago, and the great thing is that is has got people thinking and debating the issue – which was 100% the idea.

I’m collating all the details and will do a follow up post on it all w/c 12th – so if you’ve got anything to add (from either side) before then – please do let me know..

Our @tweetmas project has been a storming success and we’re really proud of our little experiment. It was really to see how well people can interact via twitter to discuss things they want and we’ve had over 2000 tweets so far with people asking for a variety of things such as “a nintendo wii” or “for chocolate not to appear on my hips”! All good fun.

It’s been picked up in a couple of places, including the New York Times – yeh baby! I’m also assured Jemima Kiss is also going to cover it in her Guardian blog which we can link to when she does it In fact, here it is.

This is a late night post but thought a quick looksie at our new Wordpress template might be in order:

Hopefully a lot cleaner and encourages the rest of the team to contribute + some guest bloggers.

This weekend was really productive as I had both Bartek (one of our top developers from Poland) and Oliver (our new CTO) in the trusted places office – thanks guys.

The whole purpose was to go through every single aspect of the new upcoming site, covering:

1. going through all the latest designs and CSS code, making sure every element matched correctly with the corresponding technical capability and code. Also that the flow of the site is really obvious!
2. Improving the technical architecture – going through caching, optimisation etc…
3. Planning the Feature Roadmap which is actually pretty hard considering the vast amount of things we could do. The trick is to really only plan up to 6 months ahead as everything will change and user feedback will heavily influence what we do.
4. Agreeing on the features left to do and those that can wait till post beta launch
5. Agreeing the process for migrating the old site to the new one and the plan in general about inviting everyone who has signed up be on the closed beta.
6. ensuring our SEO talents were put to good use.

We’ve also been working out of our favourite haunt at adam street where we get free wireless, a great choice of drinks, and a nice “cave” atmosphere which always works well when you’re doing technical work!

Here’s Bartek working hard on the new “crowd” display algorithm:

and me (for some reason without a left hand!):

Now of course, Bartek is in his last week with us as he’s moving on to start his new business idea “travels.to” in Poland later this year – I must stop telling people how great starting your own business is Oliver will be taking over of course – fun times ahead!

It amazes me how many companies out there still have very bad customer experiences and treat the customer as a commodity they can churn and replace. Now everybody makes mistakes and you can never please everyone all the time, but surely it’s the processes you put in place to minimise this as much as possible and how well you handle the problems and mistakes as they occur.

Let me give you some examples from my own experiences:

[Boxwood Cafe]
Owned by Gordon Ramsey (who is brilliant for putting the customer first), I had a meal there with my wife and in-laws, and had a really nice time with great food and nice atmosphere. As we got near desserts, they started taking a while to bring the dishes and got some of them slightly wrong, which made things a bit awkward. Anyway, as the bill was being prepared I saw the manager having a chat with his waiting staff over it and I went over to speak to him. I outlined how I wasn’t happy with the latter part of the experience and he immediately agreed that he also felt the same way and would like to discount all the desserts, coffees, teas, and wine from the bill. Great – both of us were happy.

So, they made some mistakes, admitting them, then corrected them in every way to please the customer. Net result – I have even more respect for them and will definitely go back again.

Virgin Media (no they’re not getting a link)
Now this is appalling. Not only did they lose the Sky One deal which annoyed many TV customers, but there have been thousands of complaints about Virgin Media who have been having slower and slower internet speeds (myself included). To top this, they introduced a technical support charge at 25p / minute for anyone wanting to try and get things fixed!

So quite a few mistakes here and I rang Customer Relations today and spoke to an annoying little scottish man named “William”. Now let’s be clear about this team’s role as I used to work for Telewest years ago before it became Virgin Media, in their commercial team. The Customer Relations team are supposed to “retain customers” in as many ways a possible as it costs 10x as much to acquire new ones. They can apologise, give discounts, suggest offers, and arrange to follow up problems directly. So what does William do? Well, firstly he interrupts me when I’m speaking, tells me I can eventually get a refund on tech support calls if I prove it was their fault and write a letter after I get the bill next month, and then says there is nothing he can or will do.

When I mention I am just going to disconnect everything and tell everyone I know not to bother with this abysmal service – he accuses me of threatening him and that this is not a good way to get any help from Virgin. HA HA HA! Pathetic.

British Airways
I was supposed to be at an outdoor adventure clothing show meeting some brands with one of the companies I have invested in for outdoor adventure equipment ecommerce site called Webtogs, on Friday – post Monsoon Morning as we shall now call it. So, arriving at the airport, most flights were of course cancelled and our BA one being one of them. We spoke to the customer service rep who apologised and gave us a single A4 sheet explaining how we could try and rebook another flight via internet, phone, or waiting in a 2 hour queue. They also stated that a full refund would be due.

In this scenario, it wasn’t really their fault and they were trying to book people on new flights and give you lots of options how to do this. For such short notice, this was actually a decent customer experience.

Summary
So, three sample customer experiences here, all of which made mistakes, but only one of them did a really good job of handling things and keeping my trust, while another kept me satisfied, and the third lost all respect and loyalty.

In summary, I believe so much in customer service being the number one thing to get right with any business and brand – not only at the point of sale and using the product, but right into when something goes wrong and needs handling. My question to you is why brands with bad experiences continue to thrive instead of everyone boycotting them and voting with their wallets..?

Word of my departure from Crowdstorm is spreading fast, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to express my thanks to the team, to the users, and to everyone who has helped along the way. It’s been thrilling, challenging, and downright fun.

I’d like to clear up a misconception that’s being floated around about the reasons for my decision to leave. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I’m absolutely not “sold on the old way” of doing things at Crowdstorm. I feel very strongly that the site needs to evolve into something completely new and exciting. I wish Phil and the team all the best with the giant development effort before them, and I look forward to hearing about their successes.

As for me, I’m in search of a new adventure. (Will work for chocolate.)

If you haven’t seen it already – I would really recommend a great post and call for action from Saul Klein on his blog, under the subject: Y Europe can seed growth of its new stars. This is a real push for European wide entrepreneurs, angels, and investors to create a real sustainable and innovative concept for driving forward our internet businesses from this side of the pond.

It has often been the case that Europe can lead with some really good ideas and implementations, run by very talented people, but often lack the real vibe of Silicon Valley and their attitude to risk and openness.

Saul doesn’t just talk about it in this post but actively wants to engage the topic and gather feedback and ideas for exactly how we can all do something about this in 2007.

So – let’s get cracking! Get involved and help shape what happens by leaving your comments on Saul’s post. Keep checking by his blog regularly too as he will constantly be updating things based on the feedback and outlining next steps.

Both Crowdstorm and the Social Shopping space got mentioned in the US .Inc magazinepower of suggestion and also in a summary table entitled Let’s go Shopping. Its basic angle was to suggest that social shopping sites are becoming a good way for smaller merchants to get noticed and build a bit of a brand and traffic – for what looks like no fee right now. It also suggested that small groups of taste makers get together in groups and help recommend products to each other.

Now, it may just be me, but this seems a very shallow interpretation and not without a few flaws. Of course, Crowdstorm in the form you see today may not be much different from the competitors so I can’t really complain – BUT… from my Kelkoo days I remember that dealing with even a medium number of merchants (100+) was an admin nightmare – let alone trying to aggregate 1000’s of them into a social shopping environment and getting them to a: pay and b: reports to them on a regular basis. Ugh!

With regards to small groups around similar tastes – isn’t that just a super blog?

So – thanks for the article Inc but would have been nice if you’d delved a bit deeper…

A new conference from Ryan and the Carson Workshop guys, following on from the ace Future of Web Apps 2007 that is being run in February.

These conferences / workshops are always really well done and gets a great line up of speakers. Details:

What: FOWD London
When: April 18th 2007
Where: Kensington Conference Centre, London
Price: £59 limited early bird offer! £85 full price

Speakers:
Ryan Singer (37Signals)
Josh Davis (JoshDavis.com) tbc
Joshua Hirsch (Big Spaceship)
George Oates (Flickr)
Andy Clarke (Stuff and Nonsense)
Rei Inamoto (AKQA)
Florian Schmitt (Hi-ReS)
Denise Wilton (Moo)
Jason Arber (Pixelsurgeon)
Dan Saffer (Adaptive Path)
Jeff Croft (WorldOnline)
Mark Tutssel (Leo Burnett)
Simon Collison (CollyLogic)

You can register on the official site of future of web design.

See you there!