3 Great Customer Feedback Tools for Small Businesses

Faria Rahman

March 23, 2011

Customer feedback is an integral part of small business success. Your customers use your product or service regularly and are in the best position to tell you what they like or dislike about your product/service and what they’d like to see improve. Their inputs can help your business be more successful. Additionally, encouraging or asking your customers for feedback will build a stronger relationship with them and make them feel more involved and valued.
Here are three great customer feedback web apps that can help you organize and solicit feedback and connect with your customers better:
• Get Satisfaction provides a forum-like help page or an online community for customers to ask questions, submit ideas and get support. They also offer a Facebook app that integrates support directly into your Facebook fan page. You can start off with a free 15-day trial and choose from one of their four plans, with costs ranging from $19 to $289. • Feedbackify is a website widget that lets you ask specific questions to site visitors. Such an instant feedback process with no registration can lead to lower feedback drop-out. You can ask a question and ask your customers to rate it on a scale and leave feedback about a problem, suggestion, and so on. There is only one plan and it costs a flat rate of $19/month. • Ideascale allows customers to share a feedback or an idea on a platform and vote on it with a thumbs-up (agree) or a thumbs-down (disagree). The most agreed on ideas or suggestions bubble to the top. Business owners can then respond to them or mark them as “in review”, “in progress” or “completed”. Ideascale also offers a Twitter integration. Ideascale is pay-as-you-go and has no setup or termination fees. It provides three simple plans: Starter (free), Basic ($15/month) and Corporate ($99/month). The more expensive plans contain Facebook support, mobile support and customization capabilities.
OpenView Labs is the consulting arm of OpenView Venture Partners, a Boston based venture capital firm investing in expansion stage software companies. To learn more about the Labs please visit https://labs.openviewpartners.com

Co-Founder

Faria Rahman is the Co-Founder of <a href="https://www.treemarc.com/">Treemarc</a> which, uses machine learning to make it easy for businesses to order custom packaging and product nesting in a few minutes. Previously, she was a Senior Associate at Northbridge Financial Corporation, a leading commercial property and casualty insurance management company offering a wide range of innovative solutions to Canadian businesses. Faria also worked at OpenView from 2010 to 2011 where she was part of the Market Research team.