Consumer power meets search engine optimisation

As you may have noticed, a pair of Liberal Democrats has been blogging about unhappy experiences with Abbey’s Customer Services recently (in brief – they aren’t very good at servicing customers).

This has led me to spot a very clever piece of unhappy customer reaction, namely the website www.switchtoabbey.co.uk. The slogan “Switch to Abbey” featured in a major Abbey advertising campaign a little while back, so an unhappy customer bought the .co.uk web address and plonked their tale of Abbey Customer Services woes on it.

With some simple but effective techniques the site comes up high in many searches; for example a search at google.co.uk on UK sites for “abbey customer services” brings it up as the second result. That’s a pretty effective way of making your point heard.