Suggestion Box for the web

TAG has long been an advocate of the Silicon Valley approach to evolving winning web sites. Get something out quickly - an Alpha version - to a handful of supportive and friendly users. Listen hard to their comments, improve, redesign and get the Beta out and keep listening, iterating.

We have joined the group of angels backing a simple to install, white label tool - Uservoice - which elicits Customer Feedback and Idea Generation based on “Ideas Anywhere” Approach.

Companies of All Sizes Now Have Easy and Affordable Way to Immediately Engage Customers in Two-Way Feedback Process

Baseline Ventures, Founders Fund Angel, Betaworks and TAG led the $800K angel funding investment.

A new white-label widget and ZeroLogin single-sign-on solution can be branded and deployed within minutes.

Companies can try the new tool at: http://uservoice.com/widgets.

UserVoice provides hosted community sites where people share their ideas for how to improve a product, service, process, institution, or city. Users vote up the best ideas to give a clear picture of what they want in a fraction of the time and expense it would take with traditional solutions (e.g., emails, surveys, focus groups). Additionally, with users organized around specific ideas, organizations can easily respond to them as a group and create ongoing dialogue around specific issues, which is much more effective than the classic newsletter. As a result, people feel heard and gain a sense of ownership in the solutions they come up with, thereby building a new kind of brand affinity.

UserVoice already has hundreds of paying customers in multiple vertical markets that run the gamut from technology, government, healthcare, education and retail. New customers include companies of all sizes including Intuit, NASA, Facebook, Xing, Nielson, Genentech, Blackbaud, University of Wisconsin, Animoto, Seesmic, StumbleUpon and TweetDeck.

Companies can also leverage UserVoice internally to crowdsource ideas from employees on various projects. This same feedback approach can be applied in a number of different vertical markets as well — university administrators can discuss funding issues with students; politicians can work with their constituents on new propositions; and rock bands can connect with their fans about what they'd like to see on tour.

Since UserVoice is easy to configure, any organization can integrate and launch within a day or two for as long or as little a duration of time as needed. The flexibility lets administrators generate an “ideas anywhere” solution to complement existing efforts or create new channels of feedback. UserVoice is optimised for fast, affordable deployments that don’t require a lot of planning or resources from IT departments, offering an end-to-end white label solution — branded, domain-alias, single sign on, and with open APIs for creating unique, custom integrations.


For more information on UserVoice, please visit http://uservoice.com.

For additional perspectives, please visit the UserVoice blog at http://blog.uservoice.com.

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Strong Momentum for Fizzback

I featured Fizzback in a post about 2 months ago.
At the time we were postulating that in a shrinking market, retailers and other service providers would need to gain market share to keep growing or maintain profitability.
Gaining market share usually means giving customers what they want. This in turn requires very careful listening to customer's requirements.
Fizzback does this in a sophisticated but automated way, enabling large numbers of customers to engage in 'dialogue' at relatively low cost.

The Xmas sales data currently being announced show that not all retailers have been caned to the same extent by the market. Clearly those who have been listening hardest and implementing effectively have done better than others.

Fizzback continues to win high profile accounts.

For example, last month, The Carphone Warehouse selected the Fizzback Engagement Platform to assess their customer experience, improve advocacy and drive superior employee performance.
Ashley Cook, The Carphone Warehouse’s Business Operations Director said: “We’re committed to offering the best customer service on the high street. Fizzback gives us a new level of visibility into the in-store customer experience and provides actionable insight into areas for improvement.”

Carphone joins the list of household names now using Fizzback. They include: T-Mobile, Phones 4U, National Express, Virgin Trains, Sky, HMV, M&S, William Hill and others.

Positive customer service experiences happen all the time, but the feelings they evoke have a shorter half-life than very negative experiences. Therefore the key is to capture experiences as they happen, not days, weeks or even months after the event.
Positive comments help companies to reinforce areas that they are succeeding in, passing these best practices across the organisation, and are a great way to motivate and reward staff.

In summary, making it easy for consumers to tell you how they feel during (not after) their experience with the brand yields large volumes of high quality feedback. This approach taps into a previously 'silent majority' of consumers, ensuring an accurate representation of sentiment and giving brands the opportunity to begin a constructive dialogue with a large portion of their customer base.

In December, Fizzback received just short of 2m customer contacts. This channel split is reflected below.

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• Fizzback tops them all!
• Now..... gain in market share is a survival imperative!

Fizzback shortlisted ...

Fizzback has been shortlisted for in the 'Best Use of Technology' category for the 2007 UK Startup Awards.
This category is for companies which have applied technology to provide an advantage in a traditional market or have come up with a totally new product, solution or service.

Fizzback's idea is brilliantly simple. Consumers comment or provide feedback using digital channels - primarily mobile phones using SMS. The service provider has their finger on the pulse of customers issues and comments in real time - while they are experiencing the service.
Fizzback enables consumer facing companies to capture instant feedback from their customers and convert real time insights into improved acquisition and retention. Some of Fizzbacks clients use the service to identify 'at risk' customers and initiate intervention or communication within minutes.

The powerful Fizzback engine uses artificial intelligence to interpret free form comments and instantly analyses and interprets the feedback delivering it its clients in a format that ensures they receive a continuous and real-time view of their customers’ satisfaction levels, issues and priorities. This is done via a web interface dashboard.

Feedback can give companies a real insight into what their customers are experiencing at the front line. Senior management can’t possibly patrol all their shop floors, train carriages, or hotel foyers. So they rely on feedback to tell them what’s going on. And yet it is often something that companies seem to dread receiving.

If you get to a customer quickly, at the point of the experience, you can not only stop that customer defecting to a competitor, but can actively convert them to loyal advocates. But you have to know that they’re having a bad experience in the first place.

Traditional methods of capturing customer feedback are deficient in many ways. Questionnaires, on or offline, are notoriously unreliable for gathering a real understanding of customers’ future intentions. The feedback form that tells you that a guest at a hotel was ‘satisfied’ with the service, but is it enough to get them to return? What would have changed that view to ‘excellent’?


Fizzback’s research shows that companies using this system have reported a 67 per cent drop in issues and complaints from customers (up to 73 per cent in the retail sector) coming via other methods such as letters of complaint. The immediacy of feedback stops disgruntled customers defecting to a competitor. Some companies use it to identify common problems, for example, with suppliers. If they receive a number of complaints about a particular supplier, it may be that the contract needs reviewing.

Some of the companies using Fizzback - on trial or as part of their ongoing operations and customer experience monitoring are:
Barclays Bank, The National Health, Phones4U, National Express, Bourne Leisure, First Capital Connect.

Interested in reading further, read DM Weekly article