Launch of the 1st Customer care score on Twitter – Engagement Index

As many of you will know as of the end of 2011 I decided to hang up my Twitter boots and to focus my efforts on two things. My love of public speaking and a huge desire to find a business that I could massively get behind. I got tons of offers of all sorts of business ideas and had a fair few chats with people. Sadly for me, none really rocked my boat. It then occurred to me that the business to really get behind may well be an idea I had had ages ago… Yes.. It was time for the engagement Index idea to come to fruition...

When I first tweeted and blogged in May 2011 about my idea for a new scoring system, it was reasonably well received. Quite a few people tweeted me and emailed me with questions. All this activity really helped me to crystallize the idea. However my strength is not in the maths or algorithms world. So I needed to sit down with someone who could really help me make some sense of this idea.. Enter Niki Hignett

Niki is one of the smartest people I know and is the CTO for Inspired Entrepreneur Club. During the summer of 2011, we sat down twice over Pizzas. Niki really helped me to formulate my idea, and crystallise my thoughts on how and what to measure, why and how we could actually make some money from this idea. Niki runs a fab business with his partner called – Inspired Entrepreneur.

After that, I looked into the possibility of getting investment to build this thing. I spoke to a fair few people. For those looking to get investment for a new start up you will know where I am coming from. Months went by and absolutely no interest. All I got was rejection, a few laughs, a what is Twitter comment and that was it. Enough of looking for finance. 

Months then went by and I effectively put the idea on the back shelf. In the mean time around Sept / Oct time I had met Chris Arnold and had been helping / chatting / giving feedback on his new start up called Percollate Percollate is a great idea and allows people to find their top / most influential customers really fast.

Around Dec 2011 and It was getting near to xmas. I was thinking one day about my plans for 2012. It was clear in my mind that I no longer really wanted to do much of the Twitter training and consultancy that I had been doing for the last 4 years. I wanted to find a new business to get behind. It then occurred to me to tweet about the engagement index idea again and see what happened. May be this time I could find someone who could help me to develop it.

I tweeted it and got tons of responses. There seemed to be a huge swell of public opinion to improve customer care. Then in an odd moment, I was speaking to Chris about his business. He mentioned that he wanted to develop his own data stream.. something around engagement. Well, I nearly fell off my chair.. I told him about my idea and approx 2 hours later, I think he was sold. We then met in early Jan 2012 to discuss the idea further and to put some action plans into place. Chris agreed to become the CTO

Chris Arnold is the CTO of Engagement Index. Chris is a Parallel entrepreneur, lean start up fanatic and full-stack engineer and is the brains behind all the technical back end stuff, twitter api, algorithm’s and databases. Chris is also the founder of Percollate & the Co founder of @photoPivot Follow Chris on Twitter: @GoodCoffeeCode - Enter the Engagement Index

The Engagement Index – Measuring Customer care one tweet at a time

The Engagement index is a score on how well or badly businesses are replying to messages aimed at them via Twitter. It is a measure of their customer service performance on Twitter. More and more consumers / customers are turning to social media and in particular Twitter to engage, ask for help or complain to brands and businesses. The engagement index measures how well or badly those companies are at replying to those messages.

What exactly do we Measure?

Rather than be a very complicated with secretive algorithms, we have developed a scoring system that is very simple to understand. All we are measuring is when someone sends a tweet aimed at the business so for example @ThamesWater I have a leak… or @BarclaysOnline I have an issue with my bank account… did they reply? and in what time frame. It really is as simple as that. Over time we will add extra functionality and more data points that we can measure.

What’s the aim?

The aim of the engagement index is to raise the customer service bar. Sadly customer care is in the most part still very poor. Twitter is a game changer for businesses. Through the engagement index we want businesses to be able to track themselves so that they can see how they are performing, see if the resources they have allocated are sufficient and aimed in the right places and so on. The bottom line is that we want businesses to improve their customer care.

We will be officially launching over the next week or so. You can go to our site Engagement Index  right now and sign up to be notified when we go live and which businesses we are tracking. I would also like to say a huge thanks to @mattbigg Of the Collective Design Agency in St Albans for designing our amazing Logo and to @jamesmillman who has provided us with top professional call answering via his business – Jam who are based in Borehamwood.

So.. keep your eyes peeled over the next few days. Follow us at @engagementindex and please tell your friends, followers, colleagues about us and what we are trying to do. Hopefully you will begin to see the #engagementindex beginning to appear all over Twitter.

Let the fun begin……