The growth of Customer Street

An exciting new era is about to begin

noreply@blogger.com (Stuart Forrest) — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 13:55:00 +0000

We are proud to announce that the the founders and former directors of Ufindus.com and Customer Street have recently launched Contentys Ltd and are now working on a hugely exciting internet product. Keep any eye on our blog at to find out more.

The end of the Customer Street era

noreply@blogger.com (Stuart Forrest) — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 13:08:00 +0000

Following BT's £20 Million purchase of our business and after an enjoyable handover of Customer Street to the BT management team I have decided, along with the other founder, Mark Hallam to leave Customer Street, the business we started in 2001 to explore other opportunites.

I wish BT and the team of wonderful people who I have worked with for the last 7 years every success taking the business forward. I am proud that we were able to enjoy growing our business to a size where a company of the quality of BT felt that their next big step in the directory market would be a purchase of our business.

Customer Street is a hitwise award winner...again!

noreply@blogger.com (Stuart Forrest) — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 12:50:00 +0000

Once again I am proud to hear that Customer Street's Ufindus.com directory has won another Hitwise award. This quarter Ufindus.com has risen two places to third in the rankings behind only Google and Yell.com, even three places ahead of our illustrious parent company, BT.com with their phonebook site!

Well done to the marketing team at Customer Street and I know that there is more to come when we launch our new range of products with the help of the guys at BT Directories.

Rapidsite 3 is born

noreply@blogger.com (Stuart Forrest) — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 14:24:00 +0000

It's official, we have now begun to put a limited number of customers on to our new Customer Street Rapidsite 3 website builder platform which has been 18 months in development (nearly 12 months overdue) and we are really proud that BT Directories are considering adopting this tool as their standard website builder and content management system in the near future.

Rapidsite is as I have said before, a ground breaking product in website development through it's ability to produce custom styled fully CSS based sites and then enable a basic user with almost no computer skills to maintain, update, optimise and add to their site.

The best thing is that it is free to all our customers old and new and will soon start rolling out on an upgrade program.

My first week as an employee of Customer Street, a dvision of BT

noreply@blogger.com (Stuart Forrest) — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 14:17:00 +0000

Well there goes the first week since Customer Street became a wholly owned subsidiary of BT and exciting it has been. We always knew that the products we provided at Customer Street were market leading and it is pleasing to learn that BT amongst a large group of suitors realised this too.

This week has been a hectic round of meetings between my Customer Street teams and BT's directories management team and we have sketched out a very rough plan for the future of our two companies that will see some serious challenges to market leaders in several fields of the new media business.

Customer Street will become a significant part of the engine room at BT Directories and we will see some further expansion of the operations here with more support, sales and development jobs.

What's more, BT directories already have a talented team with ideas of their own that will help Customer Street achieve our goals more quickly.

I look forward to updating you with our new ideas during the coming months.

BT Buys Customer Street

noreply@blogger.com (Stuart Forrest) — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 15:09:00 +0000

Sorry I have been a little quiet of late but now I can talk about the work that has been going on behind the scenes so once again take Customer Street forward.

BT plc today announced that they purchased Ufindus (Customer Street) for £20,000,000 which is the culmination of almost a years work to find a new parent company that could help make Customer Street the size that all the team here wish it to be.

In particular both myself and Mark Hallam, the founding directors are delighted that our work has attracted one of the worlds most respected brands to purchase our business and we believe this speaks volumes of the quality of work we now carry out here.

We hope our customers will enjoy the benefits that will eventually be forthcoming as we integrate Ufindus as part of this fantastic organisation.

Record Month for the Customer Street network

noreply@blogger.com (Stuart Forrest) — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 15:44:00 +0000

Sorry to have not kept in touch during the month of May and June but we have been working furiously on a special project to further enhance the success of the Customer Street network, news of which will follow soon I hope.

In the meantime both May and then June have been record months in terms of users on the network. In total during June 2008 11,433,708 searches (or should I say finds) were carried out across our network. In fact because of the increases in traffic we have been seeing I have had to authorise a substantial investment in further additions to our search technology platform to cope with demand.

If you are a user, thank you for all your support. We try hard at Customer Street to make the platform useful to you.

If you are a subscriber, again thank you but we hope you are enjoying the increased traffic levels via your adverts. We will never stop pressing hard to increase traffic levels further and make Customer Street the largest network in Europe.

Evidence of Customer Street customer satisfaction increases

noreply@blogger.com (Stuart Forrest) — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 13:01:00 +0000

I am always happy to see the regular postbag of emails and letters from people thanking us for what we do for them. During the last 18 months the level of improvement in the value proposition has seen this rise from a dribble to a regular stream of compliments and anecdotal evidence is nice to suggest to me that my team is doing a good job.

This week however I was buoyed this week by the news from our finance team that Customer Street has achieved record sales last month and also more importantly for me and my team on customer service we have had the best month ever for customer renewals, fifty percent higher than any previous month. This is I believe a clear sign of the value that the majority of our customer base places on their subscription and we value that and continue to make strides to improve still further. As I have stated before, my team at Customer Street really care and are passionate about the service we provide and we are pleased that our efforts to improve service (which frankly wasn't great in the past) is now reflected by the increasing satisfaction levels of our customers.

Customer Street Italian style

noreply@blogger.com (Stuart Forrest) — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 10:43:00 +0000

The first half of this week I spent in Italy courtesy of Air Miles (I had saved enough up for free flights to Naples!) so I didn't get much done apart from trudging round the sights of Pompei and Herculaneum. These are truly amazing archaeological sights that I think most people would find fascinating. It is amazing just how sophisticated the Roman's were two thousand years ago.

Back to work we have been focusing some more on the testing of our new Rapidsite version which I am closely involved with and is approaching conclusion. We are all excited about the pending new release which will help Customer Street advertisers make more of their internet presence and improve their return on their investment with us.

We have had a number of meetings focusing around further improvements to our customer service that have arisen through feedback from our customers. At Customer Street we will never stop striving to improve our service.

My week at Customer Street

noreply@blogger.com (Stuart Forrest) — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 13:33:00 +0000

This week has been a quiet week for me with a lot of catching up on the progress of existing projects at Customer Street.

As I have expressed previously we are getting quite close to completing our class leading content management system and site design product which is a replacement for our current version called Rapidsite.

My colleagues in the development department have made significant progress in what has been a long and painful road for us. We certainly bit off a little more than we could initially chew in our quest to build the first site builder that was fully CSS, WAI and W3C compliant. Thankfully after much work behind the scenes we are now implementing the front end of this application and I look forward to rolling this free application out to all our customers very soon.

In addition we have been working hard on upgrades to our billing systems and our new search rankings reporting engine and I have attended a couple of meetings on these subjects in the last week.

Finally I have been involved in the renewing of our lease of our Blackpool site committing Customer Street to a further five year period for one of our most successful offices.

Customer Street is the new world order

noreply@blogger.com (Stuart Forrest) — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 16:35:00 +0000

I was driving to work today and in the middle of the road next to a block of flats were a number of Yellow Pages flapping around in the wind and sodden wet. It reminded me that whenever I go into any flats or apartments anywhere in the country I always notice that there are usually stacks of them in the lobby waiting to be collected. The lack of collection is a sign of the times. People just dont want this Yellow Book but Yellow Pages plc keep on delivering them.

Can you imagine if every household left them on their step and Yellow Pages plc had a duty to collect the ones that had not been picked up. That would be bloody expensive. If they then had to pay an envorinmental tax for every one not claimed their business model would surely be even more difficult than their share price fall currently suggests it is perceived by the city.

Lets face it, there is a new world order out there that is electronic, up to the minute data. Who wants books that are so out of date even when they are published. Customer Street is part of that New World Order. The environmental benefits of replacing old world businesses (travel agents with their brochures and directory publishers with their wedges of wasted paper are just two examples) are huge. Imagine the wasted paper that is being saved by people booking their holidays online. Just imagine then how much could be saved once Yellow Pages give up on the paper book. The only thing is that that we will have to find something else to wedge doors open with!

I discussed this with my colleague who happens to live in such an apartment and he had coincidentally written an item on his blog about this very subject which you can read (Mark Nichols blog) that talks about this issue.

In this ever greener world remember that Customer Street has always been the greener directory!

Traffic Aggregation is what Customer Street is about

noreply@blogger.com (Stuart Forrest) — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 13:26:00 +0000

Just following on from my previous post, I was recently doing some traffic profiling work to set the scene about the scale of the Customer Street operation.

Working from various internal data sources and using several independent traffic sources available on the internet (Hitwise, Alexa etc) we were able to extrapolate how our traffic profile looks against our competition.

On its own, Ufindus.com has a pretty impressive traffic profile appearing frequently for many of the UK's most common business searches but when combined with all the products within our network which provide a variety of unique content in specialist markets we were able to establish that Customer Street provides just over 70% of the traffic of one of our very illustrious, very YELLow competitors.

Now you may ask why you would spend your cash advertising on Customer Street when we only provide 70% of the traffic of our long established rival but when you realise that they have 8 times the subscribers of us to share their traffic amongst you can see who provides the better deal. What's more, we believe our product set is a world apart from theirs.

If you want to advertise on the busiest local directory in the UK choose Yell.com but if you want to get more traffic for your buck just "yell" CUSTOMER STREET!

Customer Street profile

noreply@blogger.com (Stuart Forrest) — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 11:03:00 +0000

As you can probably tell from my previous posts I am very proud of what we have and continue to achieve at Customer Street. We have in a short space of time become one of the largest internet marketing forces in Europe. What is a shame is that people just don't realise exactly what we do and what we have achieved and don't give us the credit we actually deserve. Building a business of this size has not been without its hiccups and indeed we have learned a good few things along the way.

Just to recap the key figures:

We operate 150 local directories
Those directories generate over 5 million searches each month!
We manage and support over 25,000 customers websites
Those websites generate nearly 5 million visits each month!
We produce and support over 400 new websites every week of the year
We employ over 300 dedicated internet professionals in six sites

It is not bad for just five years. What's more, Customer Street was the driving force behind the growth and current success of Iomart group plc which now owns many other internet businesses that power much of the UK internet. Easyspace, the Uk's second largest domain registrar, Iomart Data Centres, which has five of the UK's largest data centres providing backbone internet services to many of the UK's largest companies and Netintelligence who produce the multi award winning internet security suite of the same name which is sold around the world.

Its a slippery slope at Customer Street

noreply@blogger.com (Stuart Forrest) — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 12:50:00 +0000

Well actually I am going to a slippery slope in Switzerland for a few days skiing but before I go I thought I would comment on what has been a hectic couple of weeks.

It is getting increasingly exciting to be part of the Customer Street team. This last few days I have spent talking to two of Britain's best known high street names about launching joint ventures between us and them. It is delightful for me to consider the prospect of Customer Street working with one or more of these FTSE 100 companies.

Both parties have recognised the excellent performance of our products and growing market share and have asked us to see if a little of the Customer Street success can rub off on their organisations. We are happy to oblige and once some progress is made I will be happy to update this blog with details.

That's enough work now until I return on Tuesday.

Customer Street's Ufindus Directory gets yet another award

noreply@blogger.com (Stuart Forrest) — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 10:58:00 +0000

I was delighted to see that we were awarded yet another Hitwise award for Ufindus for the growing traffic levels at the end of December. Hitwise are one of the industry leading independent traffic monitoring companies.

What is frustrating is that these awards are calculated on a per site basis and cannot aggregate all our sites together and so this does not include the traffic from the other directories and portals in the Customer Street network which would quadruple our traffic numbers!

Customer Street's multi platform approach to marketing does have it's drawbacks in these instances but what is most important is that from our customers point of view it gets results.

Customer Street relaunch Moreuk.com

noreply@blogger.com (Stuart Forrest) — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 13:58:00 +0000

This week some of my colleagues have been working on a new layout for our national directory, MoreUK. I am pleased with the layout. During the next few weeks we have a number of changes coming the the directories including a major classified listings project that will be included on Smilelocal.com and I am very excited to be have been involved in some of the meetings to encourage this new product along. I think our users will like it.

Customer Street Network rankings

noreply@blogger.com (Stuart Forrest) — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 16:44:00 +0000

Once again I am pleased to report another large increase in traffic across the Customer Street network. At current run rates we will generate over 12 million contacts for our customers this month making our network one of the busiest advertising mediums in the UK internet space.

Customer Street opens in Huddersfield, Customer Street Spain is manyana!

noreply@blogger.com (Stuart Forrest) — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 16:26:00 +0000

Europe's largest marketing network just got a bit larger with the opening of Customer Street Huddersfield. I reported at the end of October that we intended to open a new sales centre there and on Monday this week the new office opened and currently employs about twenty new staff. We are delighted to welcome the new team members to the family. There were obviously one or two problems along the way but in huge effort from the team we managed to equip this new Customer Street office without too much trouble in record time and at the same time as we launched other customer service improvement projects.

Our Spanish call centre remains on track to open in the next couple of months, slightly later than initially planed but then it is slightly more complicated than we first imagined due to Spanish employment laws. So much for European harmonisation.

Looking forward to an exciting 2008 at Customer Street

noreply@blogger.com (Stuart Forrest) — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 12:28:00 +0000

Well I am very glad to be back at work and we have never been busier. Its meeting after meeting at the moment to encourage our team to push themselves to make as much progress as they can during the next year. The great thing about new year is that most people renew their ambitions but the disappointing bit is they often fade away and people forget what they promised themselves they are going to do.

It is my job to keep on pushing the team at Customer Street to make the progress we need and desire and so I make a point at this time of year of looking at all of our work objectives for the future and them reminding my team at points in the future where they are missing their goals.

It is hugely exciting to be a part of Customer Street because we are a forward thinking company that are not satisfied to be be big, we want to be huge. Over the last few months we have seen another huge rise in our network traffic which benefits our customers and we have some fantastic roll-outs of new products that enhance our offering further, coming very soon.

There is no company out there in our market place who offers anything like the product set we do. No matter what our competition tell tall tales about they are unable genuinely beat the Customer Street team who are dedicated, skilled and keen to please.

We cant please everyone of course but please remember that we really do care about making our packages and services work for you. There is no bigger advertising network out there. We have more customers than any other company in our field. We have more traffic than our competitor directories, sometimes by many times, and our network continues to grow. Our customers continue to get the benefits of any new service or packages and we never increase the price when we add these new services.

Customer Street is the market leader in our field. There is some exciting changes coming in 2008 that will make our position clearer and we are all looking forward to passing on the benefits of our efforts to our customers.

Customer Street Christmas is nearly over

noreply@blogger.com (Stuart Forrest) — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 12:38:00 +0000

Well it's New Years Day and although I have enjoyed my time off over Xmas I am looking forward to getting back to work. There is much to achieve this year and although we are still not perfect I am very proud of what my team achieved during 2007.

During the year we started and completed a move of the full support centre to Lancaster from our parent company's offices in Glasgow and employed over 100 new people. Everyone of those team members had to be trained and adopt a new approach to support for our customers. Increasingly we are receiving compliments from our customers for both the support we provide and the products we support. There is still more work to do but prior to the move we only answered around 80% of calls to our support centre. Since the move to Lancaster we have now adopted a brand new system that allows us to answer almost 100% of incoming calls and record and deal with them in a meaningful way.

This year will see that support system rolled out to all our sales offices meaning our customers can communicate and discuss any issues they may have directly with their account manager. We are confident this will bring another big improvement in our support standards.

Since our support centre opened in Lancaster in April we dealt with 108,000 support enquiries which is truly amazing for a new team. We may not have got everything right first time but I can assure all our customers that the whole team at Customer Street are dedicated to bringing the very highest levels of support to Europe's largest advertising network and we will never stop making improvements. If you have any issues with our service you can email our accountability department directly to ad@customerstreet.com where our Accountability Manager Graham Armstrong will always endeavour to give you the very best service we can provide. Whats more Graham operates as a customer representative at our weekly management meetings and has a remit to track down and resolve issues that affect our customers in any area of the business.

May I wish all readers a Happy New Year in 2008.

The rain in Spain falls mainly on me

noreply@blogger.com (Stuart Forrest) — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 17:16:00 +0000

Well last week I managed my trip to Spain which was very informative and has opened the door to the new Customer Street SA office opening in the new year, if we can find any working days in between all the Spanish public holidays! Unfortunately my trip happened to coincide with some of the wettest and windiest days the south of Spain has seen this year. Typical of my luck.

This week has been also taken up with dealing with the fit out of the new Huddersfield office and ordering equipment.

Finally I have also been tied up with the roll out of yet another new computer system to enhance the Customer Street customer experience. During the next few months we are upgrading some of our sale people to become account managers. This means that they will begin to deal with some of the issues that our customers experience and will be able to schedule jobs for work to be done as required. Effectively what this means is that customers will be able to speak to the original sales person who worked out the details of their package with us for certain types of support jobs. We know this is an area of frustration that people feel with call centres, you just want to speak to the person you dealt with originally, well once this roll out is complete at Customer Street will be possible.

Just one more step towards providing the very best experience for our customers.

Someone has to do it

noreply@blogger.com (Stuart Forrest) — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 13:07:00 +0000

This week has been extremely hectic firming up more details for our new Huddersfield office while still trying to do my day to day duties that involve meetings with the management of various departments within Customer Street.

Next week I have an even busier week that involves at least two days in Spain sorting out the new office there and a day in Glasgow for our management meeting and one day with some banks and investors so at least 80% of my week is already spoken for at this stage.

Thankfully our affairs at Customer Street are very well looked after by our hugely dedicated management team and their staff and the work schedule is planned out for weeks ahead in most departments. Perhaps, disappointingly they wont even miss me :)

You think you have it fixed but you can never stop improving

noreply@blogger.com (Stuart Forrest) — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 16:05:00 +0000

My day today has been taken up working with our management team to examine a case where one of our customers came to us to cancel her package just five days after she took it out. Naturally we are disappointed if anyone changes their mind and we work hard to ensure that we get everything right so people get the full value from their Customer Street package. We were determined to work out what made this customer come to this decision because it certainly wasn't the package not working. Within five days her website that we created was first page on Google and she was listed on all the Customer Street network sites including Ufindus.com, the UK's local directory, Smilelocal.com and Moreuk.com.

In this case we looked from beginning to end, listening to every call that had taken place between us and the customer and we discovered that she had at one point called in for support and had been sent a text message from our revolutionary support system called QAD that promised her a call back within three hours but due to series of unfortunate programming bug we worked out that with the right button press combination it is possible that the call back from one of our support agents would not be scheduled to happen within the three hours. In fact it scheduled for a call back with 72 hours despite the message to the customer promising 3 hours.

The customer called back twice during 24 hours in addition to the original call and was told that the agent dealing with the call would get in touch but in fact the Customer Street agent did not call the customer for almost two days which was well within the time scheduled by the system but nothing like we had promised. I totally understand the customers disappointment in this case but I am pleased that it has helped us to find another potential problem which will lead to several improvements in our systems that will be implemented in the next few days to eradicate this rare bug but also to make it clearer how the processes work.

There is a genuine commitment from all the team at Customer Street to make sure we keep on improving and the point of this post is to say that we are certainly not fallible but we are working flat out to try to become the best we possibly can.

Customer Street is a business that is fanatical about providing the best customer experience.

From Spain to Huddersfield for Customer Street

noreply@blogger.com (Stuart Forrest) — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 16:58:00 +0000

Not content with expanding our operations to Spain my fellow directors have set me on a mission to expand the Customer Street sales force in the UK and the location that is being considered is Huddersfield.

Today as part of that process I visited Huddersfield with the sales director, Mark Hallam to visit a number of pre-selected sites to locate a potential Customer Street sales centre. Now we look for a particular type of site that is near to the motorway and is modern, airy and with an upmarket feel. We were lucky that Huddersfield has a number of locations that can support this desire.

In addition we look for towns that can supply our work force with hard working and down to earth individuals and Huddersfield comes highly recommended to us.

We are progressing nicely with this plan so watch out Customer Street (SL), here comes Customer Street (Huddersfield).

We are very excited about both these expansions which will likely make the customer Street staff total over 500 and will enhance our position as easily the largest internet marketing operation in Europe.

Ola Customer Street

noreply@blogger.com (Stuart Forrest) — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 10:41:00 +0000

Its been an exciting but very busy time for me as a director of Customer Street. Currently we are working on expanding the Customer Street network of operations to other European countries with new sales offices, the first being Spain.

One of the challenges of opening in another market, albeit in part of the European Union is to work out the labour law peculiarities and believe me there are plenty.

Did you know that our Spanish cousins are paying 31% NI contributions plus their tax. Now apparently this manifests itself in lower salaries for the citizens because the employers who choose to employ people on full time contracts cannot afford to pay the same salaries as the UK and still pay the NI contribution. Its a good job the beer is cheaper there! Because of the tax position, employers choose not to move to Spain and then there is less tax revenue to collect so the rates stay high. Its a vicious circle.

Hopefully soon we will be the proud owners on a new 40-50 person call centre in the Spanish sunshine. Unfortunately for me, my job does not allow me much opportunity to visit the satellite offices but I can dream. Look out for Customer Street (SL).