4IP idea: Dear Sir Madam

One in my series of 4IP ideas. (This idea is licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution licence)

Elevator Pitch

“I want to complain to the manager!”

“You’ll have to write to us - here’s the address”

This is a common response to an unhappy customer, but is actually a clever tactic for front-of-house staff at any organisation. It relies on the unhappy customer’s laziness and that their anger will subside when they get home and realise the effort involved in actually making that letter happen.

That’s where DearSirMadam.com comes in. It’s a service that lets you as the ‘angry customer’ to make use of an expert tool to put together the perfect complaint letter, with little effort.

Using preset templates, reusing excellently written letters that have been shared by other users, or by using the “Letter Wizard”, DearSirMadam.com makes the process smooth, enjoyable, amusing (”Step 5. How angry are you? I am: Very, Extremely, Vexatiously, Corruscatingly), and ultimately satisfying for the complainant.

But the most annoying part of letter-writing is that you have to write the letter, print it out, get a stamp, put it in an envelope and send it. For a fee, the site even takes this out of the equation and will PP sign your letter for you, and deliver it next day to the correct recipient at the company, even if you don’t know their name. All you do is write.

It also does letters of thanks and congratulations, allows you to share your embeddable letter with others, and even do it all by mobile!

Needs and Benefits

Consumers in times of recession want value for money. They want to know that they are going to get good customer service and aren’t going to be ripped off. When that happens they want to spread the word about how poorly they’ve been treated, to talk to their friends about it, but more importantly to get some recompense from the company that’s caused them grief.

Consumer websites are mainly based around saving money, whereas our service is all about satisfying the need for closure on an irritating matter. Writing a good complaint letter is great for self-esteem and good for venting spleen over something you can’t do anything about. It’s also much better than taking matters into your own hands in other ways!

Approach

We propose to build a Ruby on Rails based social web tool with the following components:

• Make a Letter - this enables users to use preset templates to create their letter. Using pre-built ’sentence formats’, the letter uses natural language processing techniques to allow users to paste together blocks of text, and for the english to automatically adapt to suit the situation. Much like Yahoo Pipes works, users drag and drop visually the elements they want, and just type in the facts that the sentence needs to cover. Alongside the display, a ‘to do’ list keeps a reminder of structure and content to make for good letters.
• Remix a Letter - if a user has already written a letter, it can be reused but with different content. So if someone else has complained about the same thing, a quick search will reveal it. Edit the text input boxes, and a new letter remix is created. Again - similar to Yahoo Pipes.
• Share a Letter - once the letter is written, the user can embed it in their blog/profile to share it with the world. In much the same way as Scrib’s ePaper format works, the text would be indexable by search engines as well as being attractive on-screen as a social unit.
• Mobile Letters - write via mobile directly from the point of complaint.

We would require development funding from 4IP to produce the product and get a beta to market, with the aim of gaining further investment from consumer brands.

Competition

Microsoft Word, Apple iWork Pages, Google Apps, and other word processing packages are the direct competition. These systems are based around generic word processing, and suffer from the ‘Blank Canvas’ effect - they’re powerful as long as you know what you want to do with them. DearSirMadam solves the Blank Canvas problem with the Wizard and Remix tools. Also - they are not available whilst on the move. The mobile version of DSM would allow you to have a complaint, browse the mobile site immediately, and have a letter sent out the same day. Impossible to achieve with these applications.

The BBC offers a microsite about complaint letters, as do many ‘watchdog’ type consumer sites. However they lose out on the immediacy and fun factor of our service.