'Net Features : feedback

5+ User Review Websites Critical to Small Businesses

Allison Howen — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 17:15:00 GMT

Thanks to the Internet, word-of-mouth reviews spread like wildfire – which can be both a good and bad thing for merchants.

Since consumers tend to trust the opinions of their peers more than anything else, user reviews are a very influential factor in a customer’s purchasing decision. In fact, a 2012 BrightLocal study reveals that 72 percent of survey respondents claim that they trust online reviews as much as they trust personal recommendations, while 52 percent said that positive reviews make them more likely to use a local business.

That said, it is important for businesses to keep an eye on their consumer reviews, as it will provide them with some insight of how customers perceive their business. Moreover, by monitoring review sites, businesses can learn what areas of their enterprise need improvement (customer service, product selection, cleanliness, etc.), as well as share their most favorable reviews with fans and followers. In order to do this, however, merchants must first know which user review websites are the most critical to their business. This will allow them to monitor the consumer feedback, and in some cases, even give a response to the reviews. To get you started, Website Magazine has compiled a list of five user review websites that are critical to small businesses, regardless of industry:

Yelp

Yelp is among the most popular user review websites. In fact, this site received more than 1 million new reviews in January 2013 alone. That said, the best part about Yelp is that business owners can claim their establishment on this site and not only monitor their reviews, but also interact with their customers through the platform both privately and publicly. Moreover, Yelp provides tools to its business users that allow them to track how many people visited their page, create deals to attract customers and view other stats and charts to measure the performance of their business page.

Google+

Google’s acquisition of Zagat has user reviews not only incorporated in the search results, but also on the search giant’s social network. In fact, when a consumer conducts a search and then clicks on the business’s Zagat review score they are automatically directed to Google+. This is one of the many reasons why businesses should maintain a presence on this site.

Facebook

Every social network’s newsfeed sees some sort of word-of-mouth advertising from its members, and Facebook is no exception. In fact, Facebook Business Pages have a recommendation section where customers can leave reviews that business owners can monitor. Moreover, these reviews, along with likes, comments and other interactions, are expected to increase a business’s visibility when the social network’s new Graph Search feature comes out of beta and is open to the public.

Foursquare

This location-based social network is all about the reviews. Upon checking-in to an establishment, consumers have the option to rate the business and leave tips (reviews) about their experience. Businesses can monitor these user reviews by claiming their establishment on Foursquare, and can also leverage the platform’s business tools, including engaging customers with updates, attracting customers with specials and measuring success with analytics.

BBB

While consumers typically don’t go to the BBB (Better Business Bureau) website to write positive reviews, the platform does allow consumers to do so on its accredited business pages. That said, accredited businesses aren’t the only ones who should monitor this platform, as any business can receive complaints through the BBB website. Businesses are notified from the BBB about their complaints, and have the opportunity to respond and close the complaints to maintain or improve their BBB rating.

And More…

The aforementioned are among the most influential user-review sites, yet they are far from the only platforms where customers go to review the products and services they receive. Here are a fifteen more sites to keep on your radar:

Citysearch

This popular listing site features user reviews for a variety of industries, including arts and entertainment, construction and remodeling, financial services, food and dining, health and medical services, home and garden, personal services and retail stores.

Yahoo! Local

Yahoo! Local enables users to discover, rate and review local establishments and events.

Local.com

Consumers can use Local.com to discover, rate and review nearby businesses, events, deals and activities.

Insiderpages

Insiderpages provide local reviews for the health and medical, home and garden, hair and beauty, auto services and pet industries.

MerchantCircle

Consumers can use Merchantcircle to find local businesses and deals, as well as rate and review businesses from a multitude of industries.

Judy’s Book

This website calls itself a “social search tool.” It allows consumers to search for local reviews, recommendations and revies, as well as share places and recommendations with friends.

Angie’s list

Consumers can go to Angie's list to rate and review service providers, including home, outdoor, health and auto services.

Manta

Consumers can go to this website to review and rate everything from small businesses to products and services across a variety of industries, including business services, consumer products and services, food and berverage, industrial, health, technology and communications.

Yellow Pages

The Yellow Pages aren’t only for finding local businesses anymore, because consumers can also go to this site to look for deals, as well as review and rate businesses and services.

Cityslick

Consumers can visit Cityslick to find coupons and browse local business information, including ratings and reviews, for numerous industries.

localPages

Similar to many of the aforementioned services, localPages allows consumers to discover local businesses, deals and coupons, as well as rate and review businesses and services.

Buzzillions

This user review website focuses on products instead of retailers. It featuers reviews for a wide variety of products, has a robust filtering system and allows consumers to compare products side-by-side.

Epinions

Epinions also focuses on products, however does include some store reviews as well. Moreover, this platform features a robust filtering system as well as numerous review categories.

ExpoTV

Consumers can go to ExpoTV to upload a video user review for new products and earn rewards in doing so.

SiteJabber

If you want to know what people think about your website, check out Site Jabber. This platform allows consumers to discover and review sites across the 'Net.

These are far from the only user review sites that can be found on the Web. If we missed one of your favorites, let us know in the comment section below.

10 Platforms for Obtaining Customer Feedback

Allison Howen — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 21:35:00 GMT

To keep an e-commerce store running at peak-performance, merchants need to pay attention not only to analytics, but also to customer feedback.

While analytics are a good starting point for figuring out which site elements need to be revamped or tested, customer feedback gets straight to the point by telling merchants exactly what a site visitor liked or disliked about their shopping experience. This type of insight can be used to quickly implement adjustments to a Web store in order to optimize the user experience.

There are many ways that merchants can obtain feedback from their customers, from social media to surveys and forums, which is why Website Magazine has compiled a list of platforms that merchants can leverage to gain insights into their customers’ shopping experiences.

Get Satisfaction

Merchants can use the Get Satisfaction platform to implement a more social shopping experience into their Web stores. This is because the platform can be used to obtain and respond to customer feedback regarding questions, problems, ideas and praise. Get Satisfaction can also be integrated directly into product pages with the E-Commerce Communities solution, which can help answer common customer questions and reduce shopping cart abandonment rates.

SuggestionBox

SuggestionBox enables merchants to put a virtual suggestion box on their website. Merchants simply need to add a few lines of code to their site in order to start capturing feedback in real-time. The platform offers the ability to organize feedback as well as group similar suggestions together so that one response can reach multiple customers. It is also important to note that merchants have the ability to choose which suggestions stay private or become public.

OpinionLab

This popular Voice of the Customer (VoC) platform is leveraged by more than half of the Fortune 50. It allows merchants to gain real-time feedback for a variety of channels, including websites, mobile sites, products and even brick-and-mortar stores. The platform’s opt-in, page-specific model helps capture feedback from consumers who are already engaged with a brand, which can help organizations pinpoint issues in real-time and take action quickly.

Kampyle

Merchants can use the Kampyle platform to learn which areas of their website customers are likely to run into trouble. This is because site visitors can submit feedback on a variety of issues – from broken links to reporting competitive prices seen on other websites. Additionally, the platform's feedback forms automatically prompt visitors to include their contact details and also provide a newsletter opt-in area, which enables visitors to easily subscribe to a merchant's email campaign.

UserVoice

Merchants can leverage the UserVoice Feedback solution to collect and manage their customers' input. The solution provides merchants with a forum where customer can both submit and vote on feedback and allows people to submit feedback without signing up for an account. Moreover, UserVoice’s search-as-you type functionality ensures that customers are able to find similar feedback to vote on instead of creating a duplicate entry on the same topic. The solution moderates content so that forums aren’t littered with spam or profanity, however, merchants also have the ability to turn on manual moderation in order to have complete control of content.

Zoho Discussions

Merchants can create their own customer support community with the Zoho Discussions platform, which offers rebranding tools so that users can customize their support community to stay consistent with a brand’s look and feel. Additionally, the platform enables merchants to set moderation guidelines, export data, use widgets to capture feedback from across the Web and organize discussions.

Usabilla

The Usabilla platform is unique because it not only provides merchants with consumer feedback, but also measures customer emotions. Merchants simply need to add a snippet of code to their site so that the feedback button is visible to visitors. The platform enables consumers to select and rate any item of a Web page by choosing one out of five emotions. Site visitors can also add comments to provide additional feedback if desired. Moreover, the platform provides merchants with a dashboard that includes a visual trendline in order to keep track of collected feedback over time.

Google Moderator

Google has a tool for everything, including obtaining feedback. The Google Moderator tool is free and allows users to create a forum about anything (e.g. site usability) and open it up for people to submit questions, votes, ideas or suggestions. For the best results, merchants should embed their Moderator page to their website.

iPerceptions

Merchants can leverage this platform to gain insights from customers through surveys and comment cards. Users can design their own surveys and control who receives the surveys. iPerceptions collects data such as location, IP address, operating system and browser type for each respondent, which makes it easy for merchants to analyze specific customer segments. Furthermore, the platform has the ability to collect feedback in more than 32 languages.

IdeaScale

IdeaScale enables merchants to foster a community by allowing customers to submit feedback, discuss and vote on ideas. The platform also offers a Facebook App so that the IdeaScale community can be integrated directly onto a merchant’s Facebook Page. Moreover, the platform comes with a profanity filter, a polling tool and a plethora of customizable features, including custom development, CSS and URL, as well as the ability to customize status tabs.

These are just a few of the 'Net's many available platforms for obtaining customer feedback. Let us know what platform or strategies your enterprise leverages in the comment section below.

Leave Explicit SERP Feedback for Google

Administrator — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 04:00:00 GMT

Google is on the hunt for content farms - sites with shallow or low quality content - announcing the release of an experimental Chrome extension for people to block sites from appearing in their Web search results.

In addition to blocking the site from appearing, the extension also sends the blocked site's information to Google. Should Google opt to use the feedback as a ranking signal in the future (since they will have the ability to analyze that feedback individually and in aggregate), those responsible for SEO are going to want to keep an eye on the impact.

When users block a site with the Chrome extension, they will not see the results from that domain again. Site blocks can be revoked at the bottom of the SERPs, and lists of the blocked sites can be edited.

The extension is currently available in English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Turkish.

5 Cool Tools for Web Professionals (and Amateurs)

Administrator — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 19:00:00 GMT

As we prepare our next feature story for Website Magazine -- a guide to successful Web startups -- we have been doing some research for online tools that can help businesses get a good head start or keep tabs on the industry. Below are five resources you might not be familar with. From a Twitter tool to an innovative way to solicit user feedback, these should help any Web enterprise today and to plan for the future.

Do you have a favorite Web tool? Let everyone know by leaving a comment below!

	Tweet Nest - A browse-able, searchable, and customizable solution to backup/archive tweets is a useful way to turn back the Twitter clock. The best part might just be that the application is free and can be run from your own server (PHP 5.2 and MySQL required).

	Clue: A very interesting, free Web-based application that provides a way to ask people about what they remember about your website. Create a memory test with the Clue app and capture some valuable information on users' first impressions of your site.

	Huddler: A fully-supported SaaS platform, Huddler works with existing online discussion forum sites to integrate product reviews, wiki articles, image galleries and blogs to help increase community engagement and create a unified platform.

	iFeelGoods: Help retailers replace traditional promotions and incentives such as coupons and discounts with virtual goods and virtual currencies for a wide range of social games and networks.

	Klaggle: Offers retailers and online sellers a way to improve their businesses (engage visitors, keep them on site and drive revenue by accelerating user buying behavior) by providing access to online product review content.

Data on E-Commerce and Customer Feedback

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 19:26:00 GMT

Survey solution provider iPerceptions crunched customer feedback on sites using its free 4q website survey tool and found some interesting data on e-commerce and customer feedback.

Retailers lag beyond other verticals and the webwide average when it comes to shoppers' ability to accomplish their primary task on a website. Only 68% of shoppers could actually get what they needed from the site, whether it was product information, company data, pricing, etc. This may be due to more shoppers coming to the website to research/learn (34%) than buy (25%) and more shoppers interacting with your brand and your site many more times before purchasing. In Web analytics speak, these shoppers are “lengthening the conversion funnel.”

In this environment, getting people to your site at the point they are ready to buy is a big win. But 44% of retailers are missing out on that opportunity, because of mundane but unnoticed things like broken shopping carts, limited product availability, inadequate pricing information or simply because visitors couldn’t find what they wanted.

Feedback 2.0 at Guru.com

Pete Prestipino — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 14:55:00 GMT

One of the issues companies have with managing the endless stream of feedback is that we tend to live in a black-and-white world too often. Instead of seeing things for what they are, we opt for purely objective or purely subjective assessments of things, people, or products.

Freelance marketplace Guru.com aims to change all that with a proprietary feedback management methodology that improves the value of subjective comments or rankings on its site by validating against actual performance metrics.

"Current feedback standards create an assumption of validity predicated on transparency," explained Inder Guglani, CEO and founder of Guru.com. "But as incomplete information and fear of retaliation are introduced into the feedback process, transparency requires objective verification."

Users are able to block some unwarranted feedback but only in proportion to their prior, proven success. While negative feedback is not fully suppressed, its exposure is made more reliably predictive. Objective performance metrics determine a variable blocking rate, or "blocking power," which is calculated for each user in real-time. A seven day review-and-approval period is allowed for assessment of individual feedback records prior to public disclosure.

Capture Genuine User Feedback

Pete Prestipino — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 18:56:00 GMT

Feedback is one of the essential elements of good communication. As Michael Gelb once said, "Champions know that success is inevitable; that there is no such thing as failure, only feedback. They know that the best way to forecast the future is to create it." It seems as though every company is embracing feedback in the age of transparency. Let's look at three amazing services that enable web-business owners to capture user feedback that makes a difference in their business processes.

User Voice: UserVoice offers a hosted way to capture feedback by allowing users to voice opinions, suggestions, and complaints. Its unique voting system puts the best and most popular items on the top (via Digg-style voting) but with a twist. Rather than just a simple "vote up," UserVoice allows customers to spend votes on each idea. This makes it easy to see which ideas may have small but passionate appeal and which ones receive broad but shallow support. What will be most appealing to those considering such a technology platform is that UserVoice is incredibly scalable. (It can grow with you.) The lite version of the product is free, comes with three forums and handles up to 10,000 users - perfect for startups and small businesses. The gold version ($589/mo) is ideal for larger, customer-facing companies and is quite feature rich with tools like user and suggestion analytics, domain aliasing, custom design and email support.

CrowdSound: CrowdSound is a widget that works well as a way to provide value to customer relationships and product development. By easily embedding the CrowdSound social feedback widget, websites/companies are not forced to make users register (or navigate away from the page) to receive customer feedback. CrowdSound users can customize the color of the widget , add "buckets" or categories for ease of management, and even have access to "on-the-fly" language switching. The free version comes with filtering (for spam and curse words), and can handle unlimited accounts. The Plus account, on the other hand (just $10/mo), gives CrowdSound users the ability to submit private suggestions and an enterprise-level SSL to protect the data for admins, and the widget itself can be customized. If that weren't enough for your ten bucks, you'll also get the iPhone app, which lets you access administrative features using your iPhone.

Suggestion Box: SuggestionBox provides an interactive suggestion system for users to submit suggestions for improvement to any company. Companies using SuggestionBox can manage customer feedback (with some good administrative tools, such as the ability to manage multiple users and permissions and grouping similar suggestions together) and have the ability to collaborate with customers (through private messaging, auto responders, and broadcast messaging). One of the more interesting features of SuggestionBox is the internal scorecard, which lets administrators keep track of votes and comments associated with the votes. Pricing for SuggestBox (there is a 30-day free trial) starts at $49.50/mo for one internal user. Additional users will cost you another $9.95/mo each.

Email Marketing: Comcast Feedback Loop

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 07 May 2008 14:41:00 GMT

A pretty substantial announcement has been made in the area of email deliverability. Comcast, with support from Return Path, will be launching a complaint feedback loop which forwards mail reported by Comcast users as spam back to the enterprises sending the mail.

Comcast offers the Feedback Loop Service free of charge to parties sending large amounts of mail to Comcast members. According to the site, "the feedback loop (FBL) will forward any mail reported as spam originating from the associated IP addresses back to the listed email address." Comcast recommends the use of a dedicated e-mail address for this purpose.

A feedback loop is a system used by ISPs (Internet Service Providers) that notifies message senders that one of their subscribers has reported that email as spam (often through the 'report spam' button through a client's email interface). The benefits for senders are that 1) they can identify which customers no longer want to receive email, and 2) become able to diagnose problems originating from their networks, such as virus-infected spam-producing machines.