STELLAService guides you to the best stores on the web. Go there now.
I recently sat down with Columbia University’s Dave Lerner to talk about how and why John and I started STELLAService. We also touched on life as an entrepreneur in New York City, raising venture capital and what it really takes to evaluate the customer service quality of thousands of online retailers.
Check it out on the Huffington Post, or just watch below:
[vimeo http://vimeo.com/21961959]
As we’re all aware by now, advertisements don’t exist to tell the full story about the quality or “real value” of a product – they exist to sell. The lack of transparency in this case is known as asymmetric information. Simply put, people make purchases without knowing everything about the product or the company that sells it – advertisements help us justify our purchases in a world of asymmetric information.
Enter Michael Spence, a world-renowned economist and recipient of the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. He was one of the first to formalize the argument for signaling, a common solution to the problem of asymmetric information. In economic terms, signaling is defined as the idea that one party (termed the agent) conveys some meaningful information about itself to another party (the principal). When you combine this idea with the notion that people don’t have time to do much of their own research, you can understand why a …
As promised, you will now be able to leverage our customer service ratings and seals when you really, really need them: on comparison shopping sites. STELLAService announced today that its STELLA Ratings and STELLAService seals will soon be displayed next to listed retailers on the #3 comparison shopping engine TheFind.com, enabling its base of 23 million monthly shoppers to quickly and completely assess the quality of online stores right upfront within search results.
This is a major enhancement to the five-star, community-driven rating system traditionally used by many shopping engines, which provide little differentiation between stores and allow for biased, unreliable reviews of a seller’s service quality to influence a merchant’s overall score. STELLAService, on the other hand, takes a consistent, independent and completely exhaustive approach to evaluating every possible aspect of the online customer experience.
The STELLAService seal, which has become the …
Last Thursday, March 18th, we released our STELLA Ratings for the 150 largest Internet retailers and the feedback has been fantastic. It is no surprise that the top rated business, Zappos.com, loves what we’re up to, and we feel the same way about the excellent service they provide their customers.
As Zappos.com discovered, being #1 has its benefits. Not only does it provide them with an opportunity to boast their top STELLA Rating and display the ELITE STELLAService seal on their site, but it also allows them to enjoy an afternoon of complimentary massages!
Yes, that’s right! On behalf of consumers everywhere, we wanted to thank Zappos for their commitment to outstanding customer service by treating their Customer Loyalty Team (the real folks on the other end of the phone when you call) to an afternoon of
massages. Why massages? Well, frankly, we couldn’t think of a better way to extend our thanks than a blissful few minutes of rest and relaxation in the …
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