The verb “to plebble” is not in the Oxford English Dictionary, but if the entrepreneurs behind a new website achieve their goal, plebbling will soon be as common as Googling.

The website behind the new word is www.plebble.com, a new consumer power forum that allows users to share ratings and reviews based on good or bad service they have received from companies.

The principle behind plebble.com is a familiar one, thanks to other information-sharing websites, such as tripadvisor.com, the holiday review forum. It is an “e-mocracy”, designed to achieve an accurate picture of how good or bad a company is at customer service, based on what users say.

The founders, brothers James and Will Paterson, are former City workers and applied their understanding of stock markets to the site, so it looks like a trading screen but is easier to understand. In the top right-hand corner of the home page is a performance index that tells you by how much a company has fallen or risen in value and shows the biggest gainers and losers, on a scale of minus 5 to plus 5, based on what users have said. The fluctuations in ratings are shown on graphs, so you can see how standards have risen or fallen.

At the time of writing, British Gas, Symantec, which sells computer security software, and Foxtons, the estate agent, topped the list of worst performers, while the best performers included Waitrose, Ocado and HMV.

The idea is that the site will force companies into improving service by making customers' experiences visible to everyone. James says that the concept was born when he wanted to tell the world about his own bad experience, but had no forum to do so. “Poor service is often not exposed because it happens to individuals who have no way of telling others,” he says. “Equally, if someone receives good service, they want to tell others.”

As well as allowing users to vent their spleen, the website is also an effective way to communciate with a company if all other attempts have failed: “We have already had instances where a company sees a review and contacts the customer to resolve the problem. The customer has then written about the resolution.”

The site is free to use and has no advertising, as this would compromise its values. It makes money by charging businesses for access to its data and contact details of users who have complained about them.

The only problem with the site is that it is possible for companies to post glowing praise of themselves - a difficulty encountered by similar sites. However, James says that there are ways of detecting fake entries. Anything false, misleading, personally defamatory or abusive will be removed, but he adds that users themselves are good at spotting anything that could be fake.

Case Study: Praise where it's due

Jonathan Posner, of London, is a keen “plebbler” after first visiting the site in February. He has rated more than 30 companies, mostly favourably.

The 46-year-old TV location manager, who has left glowing reviews of companies as big as the Royal Mail and as small as his local delicatessen, says: “If I get good service, the first thing I want to do is tell people. I also think that some companies get a bad press unfairly. For instance, it is traditional to knock Barclays, but I have always had good service from the bank, so I left a good review on the site.”

As well as rating companies, Mr Posner says that he enjoys browsing to see how businesses he knows are faring. “It is interesting to find out about other people's experiences,” he says. “If more people start using the site, it will be a force for good, as companies will have to start taking notice.”