The solution was designed by researchers and built by digital experts. It has Integrated qualitative and quantitative techniques and is easy , exciting and fun to use.

We set it up because although there are lots of online research solutions, none of them delivered exactly what we wanted.

Chris Robson, CEO of You Wish Group commented: “Barium offers an highly innovative and customisable product. It really makes it incredibly easy for business people to drive immediate profitability from their business by turning slow and inefficient processes into web applications. Genius!”

For more information contact Chris Robson on 07990 978 423 or chris.robson@youwish.com

Or view Barium Partners

Who Gets My Vote? is a free new service giving UK voters an easy means of making an informed voting choice in the General Election. It was conceived by You Wish Group, a digital services group pioneering an entirely new way for businesses, media and political parties to interact with their audiences.  Who Gets My Vote? has no political leanings or commercial bias.  Its objective is simply to help people communicate and exercise their personal choices more effectively.

Who gets my vote worked with ITV News and ITV.com to develop the tool – available at www.ITV.com/news/election2010 . Who Gets My Vote? is a more interesting way of deciding which party most closely meets the voting public’s needs. Fed up or bored with politics?  Try going on to www.whogetsmyvote.com

You’ll find it more interesting than listening to a party political broadcast or reading a pamphlet. You may be surprised by which party is most likely to give you what you want. It could be Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrat, SNP, Plaid Cymru, BNP, UKIP and Greens or some mix of all of them.

www.whogetsmyvote.com has a simple 4 step process to find out which party you seem to be in step with:

1. Simply click on the 7 policy areas that most matter to you
2. Select a specific policy statement for each one, without knowing which party is promoting it
3. Prioritise your chosen 7 policy areas
4. Submit your ballot paper and see which party you want!

Users will also be able to see the make-up of their perfect Cabinet, made up of whichever spokesmen and women from the parties that match their interest areas. By registering, users can save results, see how they change after each election, see how their neighbourhood is voting, share results on Facebook or Twitter and receive email alerts from ITV.

The idea was conceived by You Wish Group as a way of enabling genuine user intentions and concerns to demonstrate what UK voters really want, rather than being distorted by tribal voting patterns or media soundbites. You Wish partnered with the creative digital agency Dropp to help bring the initial concept to life and develop it in an ongoing business.

Chris Robson, CEO of You Wish Group said;

“You Wish was set up to help people communicate their personal choices more effectively. An obvious example of this is in the way people vote.  Never has there been a more important time to let people really state what they want than an election where real party policy differences are so clearly lacking. Who Gets My Vote is voter sourcing on speed, so we expect some surprising results!”

Jason Mills, Programme Editor at ITV News, commented:

“Who Gets My Vote is a brilliant concept.   ”As the election draws closer, and the polls point towards a hung parliament, the policies of all parties become even more relevant. Individual voters will love the idea of their ideal Cabinet being selected on the back of what they really want.  Not only will it provide a new source of entertainment, its results will also be of enormous interest to the media and to the political parties themselves.”

Will we see the first “open source” Election where “Votersourcing” quickly allows voters to understand and indicate which party policies are most interesting and which parties are therefore the most appropriate for them. This in turn provides a real time view of which party is coming out ahead. We think so.

Crowdsourcing leverages the power of the web to get large amounts of comments quickly. There has been some talk of political crowdsourcing but that is only the first step. We believe that the opportunity is to bring about “votersourcing” and that is what we are doing in 2010 for the Election.

More news soon.

However, it isn’t just local councils that are introducing tiered models for service now. In fact most Corporates are increasingly looking at how they can make their least valuable customers service themselves and then make higher value customers or those who want to upgrade pay for faster access to customer service or support. This is most explicitly seen in the IVR systems that all large companies now use that drive customers through interminable walls of questions and redirects on an automated basis, to try to limit real human intervention. I see this with my own bank, Barclays, who charge me to be a Premier customer, but don’t really offer any better service. In theory I get faster access to customer service and I have a personal account manager, but the reality is that the Premier Manager only talks to me when he thinks he can flog me some more products!

There are a few exceptions amongst the bigger brands with John Lewis consistently coming out well in customer service reports. The 2009 UK customer satisfaction report also put Waitrose and M&S in the top 3 companies for best customer service.

But in general the trend in bigger companies is to make more of their customers pay for more of their overall costs in some way. Conversely while many big brands are stripping out their free service, a host of smaller companies are offering better and better service. Why does Pret a Manger continue to be voted so positively for its customer service? It has built it into its culture and its business model. Companies like ASOS and net-a-porter get voted so positively because they provide a high value product combined with great customer service.

The web is also seeing the increasing rise of companies that give power back to the consumer and in turn make the company do some of the work and offer a good service. This true of a start-up like Aroxo, which allows the user to name the price that they will buy at. It’s also true of other companies like Maxbips where you can auction your savings to the highest bidder and a free concierge service from You Wish.

The recession is likely to accelerate the divergence of company behaviour with more and more large companies driving towards a tiered model, where you get a basic service for free and pay to upgrade for better service, while smaller newer companies offer better and faster and more innovative service. This will make for more interesting choices for the consumer, something the British people love. So maybe the recession will be a positive force for change in the end!

We notice it all the time on www.youwish.com. Someone wants a particular product or service at one moment. They ask for it. A business replies. But the prospective customer then sits on their hands for a while and the business wonders what is going on. Then perhaps weeks later the customer decides to respond to the business and a transaction takes place. It is uncontrollable. It goes at “people speed” not on some predictable path.

Businesses need to find ways to engage their customers much more openly and often to see how their behaviour actually manifests what they want, rather than just what they say one day.

Co-creation is part of the answer but even that is often a rather hothoused NPD environment rather than a totally open dialogue.  The real answer is in genuinely harnessing “people power” and in letting the conversations emerge around your products and services and people’s needs. To do this, businesses need to construct a natural and value adding channel which their prospective customers can engage with. McDonalds provides a good example of how to do this with their “make up your mind” initiative, but there many many more opportunities that companies have not started leveraging. An obvious place to start is with problem solving communities that add value to the business and to the customer and which do harness People Power. More on that in due course.

But although the language is over complex, this concept is going to become very a big and exciting topic of discussion in 2009 . It may just be that a brilliant copywriter is required to turn it into every day language.

The recession should start to exacerbate the problem of acquiring and retaining customers and this is where VRM will start to play more of a role. Potentially VRM forces companies to think differently about how they engage with customers and see the opportunities from having a more honest dialogue. I have long thought that many businesses would benefit from trading more openly with their customers. For example why wouldn’t a retail bank ask me if I would be prepared to stop using personal cheques in return for some other benefit? Personal cheques are expensive to manage and very environmentally unfriendly.  I would happily trade this service for something else and most banks would give up this costly service for another that they can operate more efficiently. A win-win!

VRM may be odd language, but it can certainly unveil interesting ways for busineses and customers alike to get what they want. We look forward to many discussions of this type in 2009.

You Wish Insight is now working with 3 clients in a range of industry sectors.

You Wish Insight helps large companies acquire and retain new customers.