Customers and Merchants sharing feedback online. Good idea?

[nick]

If there was a web product that allowed customers and business owners to share ideas, ask questions, or resolve problems publicly through a message board, would you use it?
I ask because we're developing an online suggestion box for small businesses.
Just wondering what the Willow Glen community thought.

Thanks!
Nick
www.FeedbackJar.com

[Janet Fouts]

I use this kind of thing all the time from getsatisfaction and uservoice. In fact I spoke to a community developer from GetSatisfaction yesterday and she said they are getting more and more consumer products coming on board. I love it when a company personally responds to a product concern.

[nick]

Exactly! FeedbackJar allows customers and business reps to directly engage other customers.
I'm glad you see the advantages of such tools like getsatisfaction and uservoice, Janet.
You can think of FeedbackJar as a getsatisfaction, but for local merchants to better share ideas with their customers and vice versa. Let me know if you any feedback.
Thanks!
Nick
www.feedbackjar.com

[Janet Fouts]

Well that's pretty cool and I like to see the businesses signed up. I imagine they like it a lot better than yelp too. It will be fun to watch it grow!

[Bryan W]

Interesting concept,

As Janet mentioned, this space is pretty crowded already and business owners love to own the support conversation, so there's a deep rooted aversion to outsourcing conversations that are by and large toxic, and requiring some form of damage control. Companies with the resources would much rather host, respond, and fulfill customer concerns/complaints in their own ways as to keep the dirty laundry unaired.

It boils down to a back of napkin benefit cost analysis: are these sites causing more work than it's worth for the businesses reviewed vs. the payoff for appearing accessible, friendly, and customer service oriented? Is it easily reproducible so I can keep third party sites from owning my user conversations? How easy is it to respond to issues/controversial information, especially as the service grows? Why should I spend time posting here, versus monitoring and responding to GetSatisfaction, Uservoice, Twitter, IdeaStorm, Yelp, and so forth?

From a savvy user perspective, there's no lack of options to share feedback - if you know where to look and depending on your motive. These customers tend to leave informed reviews and voluntarily participate in communities. Their needs are less transactional and have a more consistent value.

A large segment of the less savvy users not able to find a conventional outlet are invariably unhappy - because they haven't been able to get their issue resolved, tend to be very transactional (one problem), and are biased people looking for a platform to often spew toxic sentiment.

The key ingredient is the community you're able to build around quality reviews and help. You'll need to build a world class incentive ranking and trust system to facilitate the community required to make this a success. And you'll need to provide an incentive for business owners (beyond being shamed into responding) to participate.

Some early AM musings. Good luck.
Bryan

[nick]

Thanks for the advice and input Bryan.

Let me point out that businesses should embrace their shotcomings. By doing so, they're building a good customer service relationship. Also by discussing problems openly, they're showing to their customers that they actually cares about improving their products or services; thus, improving customer satisfaction and customer engagement.

Benefits of discussing customer service openly
1. Shows the public that the business really cares about improving their products and services.
2. Provides an opportunity for the business to engage, help, reach out to their customers, which gains them a good customer service reputation.
3. Reduce repetitive customer support tasks.
4. Give the business an opportunity to fix the problem so that the messenger doesn't have to bring up the issue again.
5. Eliminates finger pointing and allows meaningful discussions.

Getsatisfaction, Uservoice, and IdeamStorm are products that focus on corporate brands while FeedbackJar is focused on the local merchant market like Yelp. However, Yelp is just for reviews and lacks customer-to-merchant and customer-to-customer engagement. Twitter is great, but it lacks a central location search like the Yelp search bar.

[Bryan W]

Thanks for the reply! I think we agree on some issues, but I think we have quite a few philosophical differences when thinking through the business and operations aspects of the proposed service.

The primary way for a business to best demonstrate a committment to customer satisfaction is to learn from the shortcoming and fix it as to not let it happen again. Placating individual customers is an excellent touch, but secondary. The bottom line is services like this provide much more stick than carrot, and until you increase the value proposition beyond the opportunity cost of 'transparency' to the business (more on this below); I'm skeptical it'll hit critical mass, as the loudest issues will be transactional (and negative). To that point, a forum full of transactional issues in a third-party venue doesn't scale and makes more work for the company in question.

a) Transparency for transparency's' sake is over rated and a false value proposition.

Businesses should only "embrace their shortcomings" when it's in the mutual benefit for users and themselves. If it's even semi-detrimental to either party, the business should think twice before going forward. It's often the case that you need an experienced PR person to respond to many of these issues publicly. You've basically given them a nice rope to hang themselves with (a megaphone for both parties) - for better or worse.

b) Broadcasting shortcomings is not a consistently great value proposition in a competitive market. Your competitors are watching.

c) Transparency is easily reproducible by your competitors.

d) Crowdsourcing is overrated and mostly helps an existing decision to be made, rarely adding new concepts and opportunities for improvement.

Your point about tools for corporate brand maintenance vs. Local business customer service kind of pokes a hole in your argument, however. The value of small, local businesses is that they're responsive & easily accessible in the first place. Your service operates best for a business when there is a requisite level of abstraction from the customer (a blind spot, so to speak). So, basically, poorly managed local businesses could be a core segment.

On the flip side, the service is awesome for the consumer. The more tools like this, the better, AFAIK.

I've visited your site in the meanwhile. I like the concept of the points to incentivize better community contribution. The concept of actually snail mailing a non connected local business an issue a pretty unique opportunity as well! I'll be interested to see how local shops react to this service.

Sorry for the book!