The premise is simple: Many customers have tried leaving criticism for their favorite companies, but after slipping a piece of paper into the void known as the suggestion box, they never know if anyone even bothered to read it.
SuggestionBox is trying to solve this problem. Their site, which launches today in beta, offers a replacement for the standard feedback form many of us have become accustomed to ignoring. In lieu of this, SuggestionBox has designed a full-featured suggestion management system that should make the process faster and more rewarding for companies and their patrons alike.
After creating an account, users can submit suggestions to each participating company’s SuggestionBox. Members can keep track of the progress of each of their suggestions, as they each have status messages that are controlled by the relevant company indicating if a suggestion is under review, being implemented, or has been ruled out. And each suggestion submitted can also be rated by other members to give companies an idea of which ideas are urgent, and which are simply nitpicks.
The skeptic in me says that while the idea is nice on paper, many companies are going to balk at the idea of investing time and manpower into individually addressing suggestions left by their customers. The software does allow for categorized suggestions that can be dealt with in mass, but everything needs to be manually sorted initially- there’s nothing automatic. And even if a company takes the time to set up an account, I wouldn’t be surprised if the vast majority of suggestions wind up “under review” for eternity.
But despite my concerns, I think SuggestionBox has a chance. If just one large company does implement the system, and the response is as positive as SuggestionBox is hoping, then this kind of software could quickly become a staple in retail and service industries. Many consumers apreciate even trivial gestures of good faith from businesses (some large retailers require managers to call customers that have reported bad service for this very reason).
SuggestionBox is based in San Diego, and is privately funded. It faces competiton from UserVoice, Get Satisfaction, and a number of other customer service focused startups.
Jason I think this will be a good approach for customer satisfaction and suggestions. A company who believes to take feedback from their users and implant them in their system can sure benefit from it. There are in beta right now, so there is lot more to offer.
Hmm… I think GetSatisfaction has more going for it.
They’d do well to open it up for free to bloggers and for personal sites. Otherwise, they’re going to have a really hard time gaining momentum.
Sounds like a neat concept. Hope it works out for them.
I give them credit for being clever enough to disguise a site for entering complaints as something more positive – “suggestions”. The things is that sites like planetfeedback.com (and about 10 others) have been doing this exact same thing for at least the past 5 years. They’ve survived, but there’s no real business in it.
The company I work for provides hosted software to manage customer “suggestions” & complaints, and we have a few forune 500 clients. I’ve learned that most companies just don’t care about this minor portion of their client base who choose to provide feedback. Unless there is a regulatory (read: take away your license if you don’t respond to your clients) or legal reason (read: you will get sued if you don’t respond) to care, other projects seems to take priority over those wacky customers who take the time to complain.
Unfortunately fear of discovery will keep solutions like this from every getting traction. All one needs is a lawyer submitting exhibit A from the Suggestion Archive showing that a consumer told you about the smoking gun and that it was routed to the CEO’s desk where he read it and promptly ignored it. Sad but true.
This is a good idea. Will probably help small companies more than the big ones.
moving the suggestions to a third party has some benefits indeed
These companies just don’t get it. This is twice this week that i’ve looked at these products and they make you signup to leave feedback. Forget that. I know other people who also think the same as me. Especially with getsatisfaction. I’m doing these people a favour, i don’t want to have to complete a registration form to do that. So i didn’t.
This isn’t a rant, just a major flaw.
Jason:
I am sorry to say this – why are TechCrunch’s standards going down? Every feature is being reviewed as a company and moronic investors are funding these. Sorry to sound too harsh but that is a reality.
Milos
We have been using EmployeeSuggestionBox.com as an idea mangement system for our employees and has worked out quite well as we have already implemented several employee ideas already.
Island Data is another interesting customer service system that aggregators and groups comments.
It’s a good idea. Smart companies are more sensitive about what their customers are saying… or at least they should be.
The only feedback I leave for companies that have pissed me off somehow is to never buy their products again (and tell my friends and family how much they suck). If they can actually show me that they take my comments seriously I might be motivated to give them a second chance.
Raza Imam
http://SoftwareSweatshop.com
Here is my suggestion – TechCrunch should try it =P
Hmmm. Not sure this will ever really fly. Perhaps I’m a bit pessimistic after being put on perpetual hold so many times when trying to contact a company. Or could it be the “who gives a *hit” response I got from a large local company when I contacted them to ask if they were aware of the potential for uranium mining in our area–they should be concerned since they supply a lot of meat throughout the world. Don’t think radioactive meat will go over well, but guess they’ll deal with it when it happens instead of trying to prevent it.
Anyway, it sounds like a great service, but companies could probably learn even more by being tuned in to the social media networks out there. They could use Quotably.com to keep track of what people are saying on Twitter. I’m sure there are equivalents for other online outlets where people meet and discuss the companies and the changes they wish they’d make.
Thanks for the info,
Cindy
@9 Rob Mathieson.
I completely and 100% agree with you, this WILL fail if they make you register to freaking submit feedback.. WHY???????
imagine evite made you sign up to view an invitation. who ever is responsible of this is an idiot.
Airlines would do well to use these types of products. Unfortunately, airline travelers are so conditioned to complaining that it rarely is offered as a suggestion.
actually, this is a great idea…you’re wrong Mike, companies will see great value in what consumers have to say…think about it again in that context…Good Luck SuggestionBox.com!
Why not add what several online projects have added for their developer communities – a way for the public to vote up/down suggestions? It’d be free market research for the companies, and hopefully a reason for them to listen. E.g. – here are the top things your customers think are wrong, here are the top things your customers want and aren’t getting yet.
FIFTY dollars per month?? $$$$$ Ouch! I’ll put the fields in a popup, but great idea looks neat.
Another box-suffix’ed enterprise receiving attentinon
Put me in the camp that likes this idea. We launched a product called the Innovation Box last year (you integrate a website button/widget that channels consumer generated ideas to your hosted Box, and everything is transparent and easily managed). Erick Schonfeld called our product ‘Suggestion Box 2.0′ in a NextNet Business 2.0 review last year.
I’ll admit, it’s tough to get traction in this area, I think due in part to Open Innovation being an emerging trend, so there’s an education process while the kinks are being worked out of these various offerings. But when this type of thing is done right, I know there’s an appetite for it.
Check out MyStarbucksIdea.com (actually a Salesforce Idea platform), and you’ll find tens of thousands of coffee fanatics have signed up and left ideas and feedback. It’s a vibrant community, and the flood of feeback caught Starbucks brass by surprise. Not every company can replicate that success, but I feel strongly that all comapnies large and small should make a statement to consumers (and employees) that “we value your inpute and ideas”. Especially if it’s not an expensive or difficult undertaking. You might just get some great feedback that’ll improve your products and services, and it’s also a valuable marketing/PR tool, as you’re telling consumers their voice matters. And isn’t that what Web 2.0 is all about?
I welcome SuggestionBox.com to the game … even if it’s more competition.
This sounds a bit like the service we released for free to everyone just because we needed it for ourselves:
http://featurelist.org
We just added support for a light/simple feedback widget like the kind you see on the sides of the sharper YCombinator projects. You can see a bit of it here:
http://featurel...g/info/features
The feedback is all fed back to your project on featurelist.org and can be tracked their or promoted to features. The site itself is primarily a place to make it easy to get users to vote-up features they want to see, but helps everyone track the status of feature requests and feedback as it moves through the system.
One cool thing we do because we’re not trying to make money on this– we allow you to export all of your features/votes/comments to a big XML dump so you never feel locked-in.
Best of luck to these other companies, though.
The best was Scott Pakin’s (I think that’s the name) Insult Generator. I had trouble getting a Siemen’s rebate one time, so I whipped up a 9 page insult letter on the web generator and got the rebate right away. Nobody wants to mess with someone who’d whip up a 9 page letter of complaints and insults!
Sadly long in the deadpool, as far as I know. Apparently people were taking the insults personally rather than in the spirit of fun.
Matthew, featurelist new acct registration is broke on submit
Thanks, randy! Should be working fine again. We had just tweaked one of our views and it caused a last minute snag.
Sorry about that.
HAHAHA
FeVote was free years ago: http://www.fevote.com/
This is just like Dell idea storm: http://www.dellideastorm.com/
Do you know if this was based off that concept? To me suggestionbox.com seems like the same thing, just selling as as service to many companies…
I think it’s a great idea. All businesses are looking for suggestions, and feedbacks and also reviews. Thats why I started my feedback blog called Mr Feedback, and it’s slowly gaining traction. Something like suggestion box will be very useful for companies, because they can really handle all the suggestions quite easily. The problem is that often a lot of suggestions are quite “useless” or way over the top, and difficult to implement. Perhaps they should have a feature which groups suggestions rather than allowing the user to type whatever they want, which means many suggestions may be the same therefore multiplying it and causing stats problems.
Brilliant Idea.