The healthcare tech industry is complicated. Regulations from different states, employers, and insurance companies mean that nothing is ever simple. And most companies solve this by simply building their product and selling the heck out of it.

Qualifacts - an electronic health records provider for behavioral health - does it differently. They’ve built customer feedback deeply into their processes as a company, and it’s not just an afterthought - it’s the first thought.

“100% of the new features we’re considering go on our UserVoice forum first,” says Gregg Boyle, Qualifacts CTO. “We ...

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This week Diamond Candles, a soy candles company, won the SPIKE Award for social product innovation in the consumer-packaged goods category. How? By implementing UserVoice Feedback to ask their customers what their next line of scented candles should be.

The young candle manufacturer has made a name for themselves with a fun concept (there’s a ring, of varying value, in each candle) and great customer service. “The only way to rival or scale the huge companies was to connect with people through social media,” says Justin Winter, company co-founder. “To get people absolutely involved in ...

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Earlier this month we covered how LazyMeter scaled with their huge launch. But how do you scale customer support as your popularity (and cash flow) build slowly? Zibbet does it by paying a passionate community member to contribute.

Zibbet is an online marketplace for handmade sellers. Launched in 2009, they have $60,000 in angel capital...and three employees total. Their gradual success has been a double-edged sword: with over 4,700 active users, they can no longer do support themselves. What started as a small amount of work grew to two distracting, distributed hours a day that took away ...

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We’ve talked about scaling support with the slow build to success, but what if you have a huge launch? That’s what happened to LazyMeter last month. While building and beta-testing a compellingly simple to-do program, they invited a Lifehacker writer into the beta...and he gave them a shining review at launch. The result was over 10,000 visitors to their site on launch day. Which meant a lot of customer emails.

While our Timeline doesn’t recommend a ticket system at this point in a company’s life, for LazyMeter’s big launch it made sense. Says founder Aaron Franklin:

“UserVoice gave us ...

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What’s the biggest time suck at a 2-person startup strapped for time? Minutiae. And while one can ignore shaving, buying food, or taking baths for awhile, you can’t ignore customers who are asking the same questions over and over. That’s a great way to kill your startup and have to start shaving again.

So it’s remarkable that Tellfi (think Google Voice for business) is trying to encourage MORE customer interactions. Why? Because they’ve eliminated many of these tiring repeat questions by creating Knowledge Base articles in UserVoice. Says Tellfi’s Jason Corwin:

"After we posted some ...

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About.me is all about providing a beautiful, effortless product. And Community Manager Laura Gluhanich tries to apply this same strategy to their customer support. With UserVoice, she says, she’s succeeding at this goal and has a clear sense of her progress.

A tool for moving beyond beta

During the beta of about.me’s custom profile pages, the team used email to track customer issues. But as about.me gained significant and well-deserved praise and traffic, it became hard to avoid losing track of customer issues while using email. about.me needed a tool that kept their tickets organized ...

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“Our tagline is ‘Real-time event tracking’”, says Mixpanel Product Manager Jeremy Linden. “And we try to apply that real-time label to everything we do, including customer support.”

Mixpanel provides a analytics platform for all sorts of companies, but their bread and butter is in enterprise. And they know that support matters. “The difference between OK support and great support can be the difference between retaining a $1500/mo customer or not,” Jeremy says. So, in addition to his work with the product, Jeremy focuses much of his time on providing this great support.

Interface That ...

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Every time a government program launches and people complain about its implementation, we hear the same thing: “well, there was a public comment period - why didn’t you say anything then?” Of course, very few of us ever seem to hear about these public comment periods when they’re happening. They happen with small groups of people who have the time to hear about and attend such meetings, and end up being a nuisance for government and non-representative of the citizenry at large.

The United States Interagency Council on Homelessness (USICH) took a unique approach to the public comment period and got unprecedented public interaction by encouraging digital commenting and discussion of their plan.

Challenges

Leading the United States’ first ever online national policy discussion on homelessness meant that USICH had a powerful opportunity to build a plan that would affect the daily welfare of millions of Americans. Jason Kravitz, Director of Communications for USICH, knew that public feedback was key, since the it was vital to acquiring full input from the agency’s key stakeholders and those who actually experience the tragedy of homelessness. The trick? USICH only had 3 weeks for public comments. While scheduling a number of physical discussions with stakeholders across the country, USICH knew that they needed to hear from more folks than they’d reach in person. The traditional method for online commenting - emails and web form submissions - just wouldn’t do. Aside from the time crunch with the plan due to Congress and the President in a matter of weeks, USICH wanted to give the public an opportunity to have a comprehensive discussion on the issue. The traditional form of public comment often does not allow for a dynamic discussion or debate, and that wouldn’t work for such a major issue with such controversial solutions.

Wisdom of the crowd

Inspired by the Department of Housing and Urban Development UserVoice forum, USICH set up fsp.uservoice.com. “It streamlined the process immensely,” said Jason. “It allowed everyone to contribute, from advocacy groups to service providers to state and local government officials to citizens who experienced or were at risk of experiencing homelessness.” With all the talk of listening to “constituents”, USICH managed to get actual, readable, recorded feedback from the folks they were trying to help. Many of the people profiled in the plan actually got to lend their voice to the discussion. That’s powerful.

Promoting in the right places

Of course, just having a better system doesn’t mean that people will automatically get involved. USICH got tactical and reached out to the channels with direct connections to the homeless. In the age of Web 2.0 (or are we on 3.0 now?) we forget that the key to marketing is knowing where to market, regardless of how shiny or new it is. USICH took out ads in the 8 homeless publications with the largest circulations, and asked homeless services providers to tell their members. Instead of the mysterious public commenting period we never hear about, those with the most at stake had the message delivered directly to them.

Focusing the conversation

Government isn’t traditionally known for spending much time on looks or design, but USICH used design to ensure they didn’t generate an aimless conversation. While the simplest way to focus the conversation on your forum is to simply change the question prompt, USICH took it to another level and used our custom design option to build extremely visible conversation buckets that visitors could click into. When you visit their forum, it’s clear what questions they’re trying to answer. This level of clarity increases engagement, especially when dealing with populations who may not be immensely computer literate.

Conclusion

“The result was tremendous,” Jason told me. “We expected folks to comment, but we never expected this level of participation.” In their 3 week window for public comments, USICH had 2000+ users post nearly 700 ideas and contribute 600 comments to the conversation. Jason said that many of the ideas and comments confirmed what they were hearing from its regional meetings, but more importantly it provided the agency with additional context and color to provide when discussing these plans. The Federal Strategic Plan to Prevent and End Homelessness was released at the White House on June 22nd.

We salute USICH for bucking the traditional and actually involving the public. Their goals to end veteran and chronic homelessness by 2015 and family, youth, and children homelessness by 2020 are valiant ones, and we look forward to seeing this true representation of democracy used to help those in need.

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It can be a crapshoot looking for the right agency to hire, especially if you’re a cost-mindful nonprofit. As an agency catering to these audiences, how can you stand out amongst the crowd without spending inordinate amounts on advertising?

Free Range Studios has a winning formula that has kept them flush with customers for 10 years. Instead of spending money on the potential sinkhole that is advertising, they decided to do something good with those marketing dollars: they donate thousands of dollars in their services each year to non-profits and socially responsible businesses as part of their Youtopia promotion.

By leveraging UserVoice feedback forums to handle the selection of these organizations, Free Range can focus on generating new customers through the contest instead of developing a voting system or fighting fraud.

A Simple Concept

The Youtopia contest is brilliantly simple: organizations submit themselves into one of 19 categories (via separate UserVoice forums all available from youtopia2010.uservoice.com) to compete for Free Range services. Anyone can then spend up to three votes selecting who they think should get the services. 20 finalists are selected based on votes and then an internal panel of judges determines who gets the actual grant.

Built-in Promotion

The beauty of the promotional value of this type of contest is of course that the advertising for your company is built in. Youtopia generated multiple levels of promotion for Free Range:

• Companies that won and received free services are likely to become return customers
• Everyone who entered the contest gets lots of exposure to Free Range’s work, making them likely to request their services later
• The participating organizations encouraged their members to vote for them, exposing those members to Free Range as well (31,000 people participated this year)
• Using UserVoice’s custom design option exposed people to Free Range’s design skills from the first moment on the forum
• Free Range gets to add the free work they’ve done to their portfolio

Case in point:

Social Media Promotion

Free Range knows the value of social media and took full advantage of UserVoice’s custom design feature this year, adding a “Share This” widget to the bottom of each page (in addition to the standard share features built into each idea). People want to share, and Free Range Project Manager Simon Nurse says it helped a lot: “You can definitely tell the difference of a year - Twitter is huge now, and we saw a lot more engagement.”

Non-profits are fully on the social media bandwagon at this point, so allowing them to easily share their entry allows them to keep their followers engaged - and expose all of those followers to Free Range Studios in the process.

Maintaining Legitimacy

Simon cited legitimacy as being a big concern when running such a promotion. “If people feel like it’s rigged, you’re not only going to lose their interest but probably generate bad will”. Being able to give the site a custom design helped create this legitimacy, making it feel like a true part of the Youtopia experience instead of a random forum.

UserVoice’s advanced fraud detection helped Free Range avoid gaming of the contest by restricting, limiting votes and users by IP. UserVoice’s pre-moderation tools ensured that all entries into the contest were legit and family-friendly.

Continuing Improvements

With UserVoice’s continuing enhancement of the feedback system, Simon says that applicants noticed a big difference this year. The simpler sign-in system allowed people to participate more easily, and the continued polishing of the Admin Console interface has made it easier for the Free Range employees to handle the feedback.

“It makes my life as project manager easier, it makes applicants lives easier, and it makes it really easy for the voter.”

Between these changes and Free Range’s social media promotion, they saw the number of votes in the contest triple this year to 93,000 votes, despite the fact that there were less entries.

Conclusion

The formula is simple:

Give relevant services or products away +
Get your target audience and their members involved +
Build your product or services into the contest so participants are naturally exposed to them +
Encourage social sharing
= doing good, saving money, and getting new clients.

That’s an equation anyone can appreciate.

Interested in using UserVoice for your contest or organization? Our Sales rep, Daniel, is waiting for your call at +1 (888) 840-0280. Or check out our plans at http://www.uservoice.com/plans. 

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