Ratings for customer satisfaction

[Zerui]

We have become used to investment ratings for businesses and nowadays for governments. After a bad experience with a manufacturer of external hard disks I began to wonder whether we need to rating system for customer satisfaction relating to photographic equipment.

 It would need a set of criteria. These might include:
(1) quality of delivery by courier, (2) unreasonable delay between payment and despatch of goods, (3) lack of free customer telephone line to enquire about delay in delivery, (4) unhelpful response to complaints about faults in goods received, (5) and so on, I'm sure you can add to the list. 

My proposal does not address the quality of the product, but the customer experience when buying it over the Internet. The benchmark for a AAA grade rating is Amazon or Apple; I have excellent ex,perience with both.  My recent experience with a manufacturer of hard disks would suggest a downgrade to BB minus.

Given the known importance of customer satisfaction, a poor performance sets me wondering whether the company is on the skids.

I shall hesitate to order goods from a low rated company, however excellent their products have been in the past.

Goff

[Brian Hirschfeld]

Generally, especially with specialty photographic products, like many here use, its fairly easy to find out online, who's a good dealer and who isn't. Moreover its fairly rare to purchase something without having some sort of contact whether In person, by phone, or via e-mail with a representative of a company to confirm details about the item and such, I am not sure any S&P or Moody's rating system would have any value, that a little research inherent to the process of buying such things wouldn't provide anyway...

[Zerui]

Thank you Brian. To be clear: I'm concerned about buying direct from manufacturers. There is often no retail outlet in my town for equipment that I need. When there is I have, of course, developed a good relationship with a trusted shop.  Goff

[pixjohn]

I purchase my Leaf Aptus back from Calumet and all I can say, what a joke. They left me hanging with a bad back and all types of problems that took years to get fixed.

I need to give credit to Steve Hendrix at Capture Integration. He stepped in to help, and i did not even buy the back from him. If/when I buy a new back I will call Capture Integration first.

[Brian Hirschfeld]

Personally, I wouldn't trust calumet farther then I could throw them, stuff like this confirms this

[feppe]

Practically all end-user facing companies already do that on some level; many use informal methods, big ones use formal systems such as Net Promoter Score (NPS). Most don't release their own research, but many industry associations and magazines do their own studies which can be used for benchmarking.

I'm not aware of something like this in photography other than a disparate group of price comparison websites with highly suspect data quality. An independent source would be valuable, but without some serious financial backing it would have to rely on self-selecting user inputs, which can and will be abused.