Get your customer to talk: The cool way!

Posted on March 15, 2011

Tags: Consumer Survey, CRM, Customer Feedback, Customer Relationship Management, Ratings, Reviews, Sonsumer Feedback, Strategy

It would be fair to say that there’s a big enough competition amongst brands to excel and establish themselves in the current consumer driven market scenario. Gone are the days when consumers used to visit many stores in order to zero down on one product. A lot of consumer centric organizations, especially from the FMCG sector, are re-structuring their marketing spends, by increasing the percentage of funds invested in digital marketing initiatives every year. The Internet has become almost as powerful a medium as television and is slated to reach gargantuan proportions in the decades to come; and well, much to the shock of purists of conventional marketing strategies, blasphemously leave even the television behind as the most powerful marketing medium.

Many global brands are now resorting to digital marketing, harnessing the power of the Internet as the consumer becomes more aware about products/brands s/he wants to choose. Most consumers now do their research online and there are a plethora of sites and forums out there giving them ratings & reviews of the product they choose or desire. Brands have now begun to realize that feedback, ratings and reviews are the most powerful metrics to enhance customer relationship management strategies and ensure a long lasting association.

For this purpose there are many tools and services available on the Internet that help gauge the pulse of a consumer by capturing their opinions objectively in the form of reviews, surveys and ratings. A few of them are as follows:

www.4qsurvey.com:

Our Rating: 4/5

The 4Q Online Survey is a free online survey solution that allows you to find out why visitors are at your website, and whether or not they are completing their tasks (and if they aren’t, what’s getting in the way?). The 4Q online survey provides answers to the following 4 essential questions:

a. What are visitors at my website to do?
b. Are they completing what they set out to do?
c. If not, why?
d. How satisfied are my visitors?

Thousands of companies are already gaining tremendous insight into the customer experience on their website. You too can measure purpose of visit and task completion (and of course, satisfaction).

And best of all…the 4Q online survey is completely free!

This is an easy to use tool and I will tell you why. When you arrive at the website, you are greeted with the text mentioned above and then you’re given an option to ‘sample’ a 4Q Survey. The look and feel is nice and the survey interface is in the form of a light box that pops up once your website is loaded. The survey gives the user the option to ignore it and continue to the website. You can choose the questions you would like to ask your website visitor and customize as per the information you’re looking to gather from the user. The interface doesn’t interfere with the design of your website and the survey is a set of quick questions which most consumers would happily oblige to answer.

www.bazaarvoice.com:

Our Rating: 4/5

The eponymous website mentions this service as a tool that brings the power of social commerce to the world’s best brands. Social commerce happens when you connect customers to one another in ways that drive measurable results to your business. Bazaar voice enables your website to get information from your consumer and also enable your consumer to do things s/he would’ve subconsciously wanted to do but never could because of lack of means to do so. Here’s a look at some of their interesting services:

Ratings & Reviews: Today’s consumers are already talking about you. Host their conversations on your site to improve your business.
Ratings & Reviews lets your customers share their honest feedback on your site, directly in the purchase path. This feedback fuels the consumer’s decision-making to drive sales, decrease product returns, and build trust in your brand.
Insights gained from Ratings & Reviews help you understand how consumers buy, what they value most, and how your brand can fulfill their needs. This is the first step to revolutionizing your business through the voice of the customer.
Bazaarvoice makes it easy to get started by doing the heavy lifting on deployment and seamlessly integration into your existing workflows and teams, additionally it coaches you with best practices every step of the way so that you get the maximum business impact.

Ask & Answer: An unanswered question can kill a sale, sending your prospect to find answers and make purchases elsewhere. So how do you keep them on your site, and in the buying mood?
Ask & Answer lets customers ask questions about your products and services directly in the purchase path. Other consumers, manufacturers, and product experts share their knowledge by answering these questions. This exchange creates a real relationship between your brand and consumers, provides insights into how consumers buy, and is hosted directly where consumers make decisions. As the host, you’ll become the preferred source for real answers, setting you apart from the competition.

ActiveProfiles:
When shoppers come to your site, they’re looking for options most relevant to them — not to the “general public”. At the same time, your most loyal customers want to be recognized for their contributions and they want to hear from others like them. ActiveProfiles lets contributors share information that’s relevant to your brand; lets you recognize them with badges as an expert or frequent contributor, and helps them find other contributors who share their characteristics. When consumers feel appreciated, they’ll contribute more often, engage more deeply, and build an emotional connect with your brand. This information helps shoppers discover relevant content by searching on the personal traits most important to them. For example, if you’re a novice female golfer, you may not care what a professional male golfer has to say about a putter, but you are interested to hear from other women who are starting out. ActiveProfiles lets you find others like you, to discover products and information that’s truly relevant. It’s also a good way for a brand to easily and automatically tailor information for its customers, making them immediately feel at ease and part of the community. The idea is not to create a “Facebook” on your site. The information contributors share relates directly to their relationship with your brand, staying focused on what’s important to you, them, and other shoppers.

This content works to make shoppers more confident in their purchases and positions your site as a community to trust.

www.feedbackify.com:

Our rating: 3/5

Feedbackify is a website widget that lets business owners ask specific questions from visitors (such as, “Rate our new design on a scale of 1 to 10?), and solicit feedback in customizable categories (such as, ideas, bug reports or general comments). The app is focused strictly on gathering feedback— there’s no way for users to vote up ideas or any way for you to revert to feedback from within the app. You do, however, get plenty of information about the user, so you can reply to any feedback on your own time. After you create/edit/modify your form and save changes, you get the option to deploy the form. Under this option, you can choose one out of three methods to deploy the form. Feedbackify allows the user to customize the feedback button in case the user doesn’t wish to use Feedbackify’s standard Feedback Button and use a Give Feedback text link on his/her website.

All in all it’s a nifty tool, yet the amount of time a first time user takes to get to the interface and figure it all out is a wee bit challenging. A persistent user will find the form created by himself/herself to be pretty cool as most of the questions s/he would want to put in the form are already present by default. I believe except the intuition, the tool is pretty good.

www.kampyle.com:

Our rating: 4/5

Kampyle is a feedback widget that, like Feedbackify, allows business owners to ask pointed questions. Unlike Feedbackify, Kampyle offers utilities to converse with customers from within the app via a built-in response system, as well as an automatic system that sends customers relevant responses based on the type of feedback they leave.

One of Kampyle’s strongest points is its analytics tools. The app integrates with Google Analytics, Omniture and Nedstate, which offers business owners better insight into how customers are interacting with a website. Kampyle also integrates with Salesforce.com for CRM.

Cost: Kampyle offers pricing for websites ranging from free to $499/month.

The interface is precise and very compact thus not taking much time out of the user’s hands. The tool can be used for website feedback analytics, app feedback analytics and ad feedback analytics. Kampyle doesn’t allow free registrations, which means they mean business and they are sticking to their policy!

www.opinionlab.com:

Our Rating: 3.5/5

OpinionLab offers a suite of tools for gathering customer feedback from websites, mobile, social media, e-mail, and even in brick-and-mortar stores (from a store kiosk or mobile comment card app). The app offers a widget that can gather comprehensive feedback from multiple-choice questions to open response areas and a number of different ways to solicit feedback (from e-mail invitations to opt-in buttons). Information is also gathered about the customers that are leaving feedback (such as their browser, operating system, time on site, referring page, etc.) and once feedback is collected it is algorithmically analyzed and sorted.

OpinionLab also offers solutions for monitoring social media for feedback your customers are leaving via other channels.

Cost: Pricing varies.