The Customer Service Survey
Announcing the VocaLabs Sucks Rocks Index
Fri - July 27, 2007 01:58 PM in
If you want to find out if a big company has consumer complaints, one thing you might try these days is doing a google search for the phrase "Big Company Sucks," since these days a lot of people post their complaints online and the word "sucks" seems to be a common expression of extreme discontent.
(Some readers may take offense at my use of what was once a fairly earthy bit of slang. I'm not passing any judgment on the politeness of the term, just offering an observation about its ubiquity online.)
That's interesting, but surely there must be some way to actually use that information quantitatively to gauge consumers' general level of discontent with any given company.
For example, you might search for the phrase "Big Company rocks," then calculate the ratio of the number of hits for each phrase: the rocks to sucks ratio.
And so this leads to the VocaLabs Sucks Rocks Index.
For most companies, the ratio of Rocks to Sucks seems to be pretty lopsided, with "sucks" dominating (not surprising, as people like to complain). So I made one minor tweak: I express the index as the base-10 logarithm of the ratio of Rocks to Sucks.
On the Sucks Rocks index, positive numbers mean that there are more "rocks" than "sucks," while negative numbers mean that "sucks" are more common than "rocks." An index of zero means that the two search phrases return the same number of results.
Here are the rankings for the major financial institutions we follow in our SectorPulse survey:
Bank of America: -0.75
Citibank: -2.6
PayPal: -1.7
Wachovia: -1.9
Washington Mutual: -2.0
Wells Fargo: -1.1
And here are the scores for the computer companies we track in our Service Quality Tracker:
Apple: -0.20
Dell: -0.75
Gateway: -0.45
Hewlett Packard: -1.53
I searched for some other terms which people probably have strong opinions about:
iPhone: +0.36
Ferrari: -0.12
Barry Bonds: -1.5
Google: -0.057
So there you have it. The ultimate way to measure whether a company sucks or rocks.
Posted by Peter Leppik
That's interesting, but surely there must be some way to actually use that information quantitatively to gauge consumers' general level of discontent with any given company.
For example, you might search for the phrase "Big Company rocks," then calculate the ratio of the number of hits for each phrase: the rocks to sucks ratio.
And so this leads to the VocaLabs Sucks Rocks Index.
For most companies, the ratio of Rocks to Sucks seems to be pretty lopsided, with "sucks" dominating (not surprising, as people like to complain). So I made one minor tweak: I express the index as the base-10 logarithm of the ratio of Rocks to Sucks.
On the Sucks Rocks index, positive numbers mean that there are more "rocks" than "sucks," while negative numbers mean that "sucks" are more common than "rocks." An index of zero means that the two search phrases return the same number of results.
Here are the rankings for the major financial institutions we follow in our SectorPulse survey:
Bank of America: -0.75
Citibank: -2.6
PayPal: -1.7
Wachovia: -1.9
Washington Mutual: -2.0
Wells Fargo: -1.1
And here are the scores for the computer companies we track in our Service Quality Tracker:
Apple: -0.20
Dell: -0.75
Gateway: -0.45
Hewlett Packard: -1.53
I searched for some other terms which people probably have strong opinions about:
iPhone: +0.36
Ferrari: -0.12
Barry Bonds: -1.5
Google: -0.057
So there you have it. The ultimate way to measure whether a company sucks or rocks.
Posted by Peter Leppik
Posted at 01:58 PM | | | | |