Aside from covering conversational marketing tactics by other companies, I to have a day job like most of you. From 9 to 6pm or sometimes 7 or 8, I'm the Chief Marketing Officer of a new technology startup in Solana Beach, CA called Positive Digital Solutions. We're setting out to create some innovative platforms for changing the way companies and customers engage each other as well as some other areas for which I can't discuss yet. So for anyone part of a startup, you know the environment ... everything is a priority and there never seems to be enough time to tweak that last piece of code, move that pixel 5 more centimeters or brainstorm new copy for the homepage; then Techcrunch calls you and says they want to write you up. Everything pauses like time stood still and you take a deep breath and hope you're ready for the traffic.Launching SuggestionBox.com has been a great experience in understanding what the user truly want AND the best part is ... now they have a place to leave us all of their feedback, suggestions and ideas, in one place. Outside of being a blatant "toot our own horn", I'm going to give the straight forward why SuggestionBox is good for your business. Yes we don't have an API yet, yes people have to sign up, yes you need the email of the company in order to contact them, BUT there's a lot of great features for those Small to Medium-sized businesses that want to get a feedback mechanism setup in a matter of minutes.
SuggestionBox is trying to fill the gaping void of "customer fulfillment" that exists from the online to offline channel. You submit feedback to any big website or put a comment card in a wooden box on the wall, what happens..? Usually nothing. You don't know who got it, if they are going to respond and if it ever gets implemented. This is the core of SuggestionBox.com. You submit an idea or suggestion to a company, they post it to the public and update the status. You receive a notification in your dashboard that it's been updated from New to Under Review, Under Review to Pending Implementation and so on. Finally, you're getting something in return! And that's why you sign up. Every company you wanted to submit suggestions to is in one place. What do you do when you want to pay for something online? Do pull your credit card out everytime or is PayPal an option; simply login and click pay. We know SuggestionBox.com isn't the standard yet, BUT we're positioning it to be something as simple as the name for SMB, Enterprise, Fortune 1000 to 50, etc.
For the marketers out there and being one I know, think about reaching out to your customers and letting them you're listening, willing to "engage" them and then having the ability to re-connect months from when they submit ideas letting them know you've implemented their suggestion. If you know anything about lifetime value, then you can see the value in re-connecting with customers instead of missing an opportunity and losing them to a competitor. If you're not putting the time in with them; you can bet your competitors are.
What about if you're in HR and you're trying to figure out why your front line employees aren't performing or aren't loving their job? You assign employees to various customizable categories. As you categorize incoming suggestions, these employees receive the idea and then can respond to customers directly or leverage the internal scoreboard to weigh in on the Pros and Cons of the idea. Employee Empowerment? Pretty sweet.
Go check out www.SuggestionBox.com and try it out. Leave your feedback in the suggestionbox.suggestionbox.com account and if you don't I'll run into you at the many events we'll be attending.
