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A handy tool for capturing ideas from your customers: UserVoice
Here’s a handy tool for capturing ideas from your customers: UserVoice.com. It’s effectively an “ideas box”, into which your website’s visitors can suggest ideas for improving your website and business. They can also vote on which ideas they like most.
It has a lot of similarities with Kampyle, but with a social aspect. If you give it a try, please leave a comment below and let us know how you benefit from it.
And, if you haven’t done so already, don’t forget to read our free report, “Tools That Reveal Why People Abandon Your Website”. These tools tell you exactly why many of your visitors aren’t ordering, so you don’t have to guess at how to persuade them. They provide a brilliantly reliable way of increasing your website’s profits.
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Hi, I have had a look at this, and it’s quite different from Kampyle. It does not provide an easy feedback option, like Kamplyle did.
We have now abandoned Kampyle, as the free service only allows you to see 25 feedback items per month. The paid-for plans are way too expensive for small businesses. If you could suggest another solution, maybe self-hosted, that would be great.
Very disappointed in how Kampyle advertised this as a FREE service, and then suddenly started charging $99/month. Not a good way to do business!
Thanks!
Hi Lisa…thanks for your comment, it’s great to hear from you!
We agree UserVoice is not quite as simple as Kampyle for submitting the feedback, but it’s still really valuable if you don’t already have a way of gathering this type of information from your visitors.
Regarding a self-hosted version of Kamyple, some of our clients create their own pop-up forms (or embedded forms at the bottom of each page) to gather feedback by email, but we personally prefer Kampyle, as it’s so easy to implement the tool and then manage the feedback.
If anyone can help Lisa find a self-hosted, free alternative to Kamyple please leave a comment!
We’ve used both Kampyle and Get Satisfaction for several sites we’ve built for clients.
Get Satisfaction is very simple and also allows ideas to be voted on to gain the social aspect of user generated feedback.
Best!
Stephan
I’ve been using UserVoice for a while for one project. If you’re planning a total site overhaul it’s a great way to prioritise features in the order of how many users will benefit.
Great comments Stephan and Richard…thanks for sharing!
Just to add to Stephan’s recommendation (because it’s not clear on their site until you sign up), getsatisfaction.com’s free service allows up to 1,000 ‘unique customers’ per month.
From their site:
How do you calculate unique customers?
Individuals who visit your customer community in Get Satisfaction are tracked by a cookie. In any given month, each customer will be counted only once toward your limit, even if they view many topics over multiple sessions. You don’t have to worry about tracking this number. We’ll contact you if you are getting close to your limit.
Thanks for your comment Michael!
Too expensive for most small businesses.
Hiya Guys,
I’ve also been disappointed that Kampyle jumped from free to $99 per month.
As an alternative, I can suggest 4Q – from Avinash Kaushik and iPerceptions. It’s much simpler than Kampyle in terms of questions – similar in setup. And it’s free.
Hope that helps…
Respectfully,
Phillip
We’ve been using UserVoice with some success to collect user feedback. It’s a good tool, but it does require some extra effort on our part to get users to use it – that is, we need better conversion on the voting system!
Also, the ranking system doesn’t provide a realistic method of prioritization – the features are ranked according to “all-time votes” but I think it would be better if they were ranked according to “conversion rate” – that is, what % of those who saw a feature voted for it – since this better reflects the interests of the users.
I think for small business and those who want a free solution, Google moderator is a great tool!
The only downside is requiring a Google Account, which many have already!
I can’t get why are they so expensive. Why a simple widget with a “submit an idea” button would be priced so much money per month? (without the community manager and all that). I guess there must be some cheaper (even free) solution?
By the way, Conversion Rate Experts, I felt blessed when I discovered your site. It is sooo good with such great info on improving an e-business. I’m looking forward to every one of your emails.
I have been using Kampyle and UserVoice for Iconfinder.net and none of them are doing a very good job. The “pop-up”-method of both these tools isn’t very user friendly. I’m still waiting for the perfect tool to collect feedback from the users.
Looks good but as already said, why pay for someone else hosting a form? I installed a shortened survey template on one of my sites which sends me the comment by email. No checking others websites, no sharing (valuable) data with others.
We’ve implemented getsatisfaction.com on our website. However, I don’t think it’s really suited to us – I’ve used it on here as I used Hootsuite for twitter and it seems useful because this is a beta product and used as a service which people like to improve to their liking. My website is more of an aggregation of content so not really suited to this – good tool though from what I’ve seen and more of a social element to it than Kampyle.
Fantastic examples and advice everyone…thanks so much for your contributions!
In defense of these subscription services, not all web businesses have easy access to the technical resources needed to create and develop their own feedback tools. In this situation, many companies are happy to pay a monthly fee for the convenience and ease of implementation.
Although $99/month might seem like a lot to pay for this kind of service, one of our clients (already generating over £10m/year online) received a double-digit improvement in conversion rate as a result of an insight that was obtained from Kampyle…which more than paid for the subscription price, several times over.
Both UserVoice and GetSatisfaction are great tools belonging to the world of Idea Management – where users submit ideas and vote them up or down. 4Q is great survey system with which one can ask users and collect their answers on 4 questions, while getting a great tool to review the results of those answers.
Kampyle, however, is a Feedback Analytics tool that allows collection of individual feedback on a page and site level, in addition to analyzing, managing it, and getting back to users who submitted it. We invite you to read a more detailed comparison between the tools here: So what IS the difference between Feedback and Surveys?
Kampyle offers a very powerful free service, which is usually enough for small websites, alongside advanced packages for websites who want to enjoy the full power of Kampyle Feedback Analytics.
Eran Savir
Co-Founder and VP Business Development, Kampyle.
Great post! Just wanted to let you know you have a new subscriber- me!
I appreciate Eran’s info on this topic, and the very informative comments. It seems to me that small businesses could forgo the more expensive or complex services and use a simple formmail script. Or conduct an Ask campaign. I don’t know much about developing PHP scripts, but I’m learning a lot from Robert Plank. I’ve purchased pre-made scripts from him that can’t be found elsewhere, and I’ve also downloaded tutorials from him that teach how to write your own scripts.
Uservoice would be nice if their pricing was reasonable. 100 votes is free, but if you want any more than that it’s $90 a month.
A voter is any user that has voted for an idea on your forums in a month. Most sites, especially the troubled sites that are looking for something like Uservoice to get feedback, would roll through 100 votes within a week. I really like their service but honestly I could pay someone in India $90 to create the whole darn Uservoice site for me.
I really wish they’d figure out a more reasonable pricing structure. They’re not paying someone to tally the votes by hand so I don’t understand jumping from Free to $90 a month. Looks to me like they misplaced a decimal point and the prices should be $2, $9, $29, $59 instead of $20, $90, $289 and $589. Feedback is great, but who would pay hundreds of dollars a month when it’s so much cheaper to pay someone overseas? $589 is two months salary in Pakistan.
They explain why the can’t lower their price here.
“Our pricing is always under review, because we want to provide the best value for our customers, while also providing the best features. We also need to stay in business to provide anything. So, please be as specific as possible in your comments.”
We need to stay in business? Exactly how many hundreds of dollars a month do you need to “stay in business”? Did they all quit their day jobs in the hopes everyone will pay $90+ a month?
Sorry Uservoice but as soon as someone offers what you do for $5 to $10 a month I’m signing up with them.
If you have your own web server, take a look at VoxPopuli. This is a web widget designed for hosting on your web site. It’s free and open-source and it can be easily integrated into any CMS, forum system and alike.