You call THAT customer service?

[francis]

Lucky this forum is secure...

I had the, erm, pleasure of looking at the new Institute Of National Customer Service site today. This is supposed to be a body that leads the way for all customer service organisations and departments in the UK. A beacon in the light of customer service, promoting excellence, etc etc.

They've recently had their site (http://www.instituteofcustomerservice.com/default.asp) redesigned, and from what it was to what it is now, it will have cost them not a small amount of money. So, it was slightly alarming to see that they hadn't bothered with any other browser apart from IE. If you look at their list of Organisational Members (http://www.instituteofcustomerservice.com/org_members.asp?ContentID=34&NavBar=Membership&Level2=List+of+Organisational+Members&ParentContentID=5), you'll see some fairly/very big names there. You'd think that they'd want to get things right. Oh well.

Have a look at their site in IE, then look at some screen captures I've pulled off (they are large hence the links). Here's their 'email a friend' page in Opera (http://www.websitearchitecture.co.uk/storr/forumimgs/ncs-email-a-friend-opera.gif), their 'email a friend' page in Mozilla (http://www.websitearchitecture.co.uk/storr/forumimgs/ncs-email-a-friend-mozilla.gif), their home page in Opera (http://www.websitearchitecture.co.uk/storr/forumimgs/ncs-home-page-opera.gif) and their utterly broken login page (http://www.websitearchitecture.co.uk/storr/forumimgs/ncs-login-moz.gif) and search facility (http://www.websitearchitecture.co.uk/storr/forumimgs/ncs-search-moz.gif) in Mozilla. Sigh.

Other than those points, what does anyone else think of the site?

[francis]

Argh!

Firstly I have just shown that I can't spell "call", and secondly the forum has munged my links. If you take out any %20 (spaces) in the links then the images are there.

All OK now

[James]

They should have made it usable in all browsers but at least they have covered the popular majority who use IE.

I think the site is quite poor. Here are some things I found annoying after a very quick look:

UK Service Reputation Survey is a Word download which then needs emailing, posting or faxing back to the ICS. Why not an on-line survey? Weird.

There are two small banner ads underneath the links on the left. They change at random (try refreshing page) but sometimes this leads to identical adverts duplicated! Rubbish!

Accessibility is poor. The text will not resize in IE and I couldn't find a large text version.

Text hierarchy is generally good with headline texts used well.

Navigation is OK, I didn't get lost thanks to the breadcrumbs.

Thanks for keeping this forum going Francis, it's a shame the other students don't contribute.

[David]

Hmm. I find the page design incoherent. It's difficult to know where to look. Many of the elements don't line up or have little relation to one another and the overall effect is bitty, messy and uncoordinated. The most annoying aspect of the page design is the way the right-hand column boxes swoop to the right, taking your focus away from the text. It would have been better to mirror that curve so that the text was properly framed in the central column.

I wonder what the others think... Ron, Shushan, Stephen? Where are you?

Francis, it's a joy to correct your spellings. Oh, and I fixed the links too.

[Tom]

I like the site map. How much do you think the re-design of the site cost?

[francis]

The original site was atrocious. Absolutely appalling. It was, by their own admission, created by some who 'dabbled' in web design. They had problems such as important images linked to the developer's C drive, nested frame sets, an utterly pointless Flash spash screen, navigation rollovers were done using Java Applets, there were <marquee> tags all over the place, content in tables with the table borders showing... They also hit a problem when the 'developer' went on maternity leave!

This new site, by comparison, is fantastic. It was built from the ground up. Apart from their logo, there is virtually no content remaining from their original site. How much would it cost? I wouldn't like to say, but it can't have been cheap.