UserVoice Rolls Out Customer Feedback and Idea Generation Tool Based on New "Ideas Anywhere" Approach

Companies of All Sizes Now Have Easy and Affordable Way to Immediately Engage Customers in Two-Way Feedback Process

05.18.2009 – SANTA CRUZ, Calif. - May 18, 2009 - UserVoice today unveiled the first white-label solution that enables anyone to embed highly-branded widgets and communities into their site for suggestions, voting, and user feedback. This seamless integration moves companies one step closer to an “Ideas Anywhere” approach for customer engagement that is intimate, immediate and effortless - helping overcome the limitations of traditional customer feedback and idea generation. Along with the new widget, UserVoice announced new “smart money” investors, the addition of social media expert Bob Pearson as a company advisor, a host of new enterprise customers and the ZeroLogin single-sign-on (SSO) solution. Companies can try the new tool at: http://uservoice.com/widgets.

“It is time for an ‘Ideas Anywhere’ approach that hinges on building a direct and interactive dialogue with users in any community or site, inside or outside of a company or organization,” said Bob Pearson, former leader of IdeaStorm at Dell and founding partner of Common Sense Media Group. “By engaging people in open and ongoing conversations, companies get to know their customers and gain valuable insight into their needs and wants. This feedback translates into new ideas that help companies provide better products and services to their customers.”

UserVoice provides hosted community sites where people share their ideas for how to improve a product, service, process, institution, or city. Users vote up the best ideas to give a clear picture of what they want in a fraction of the time and expense it would take with traditional solutions (e.g., emails, surveys, focus groups). Additionally, with users organized around specific ideas, organizations can easily respond to them as a group and create ongoing dialogue around specific issues, which is much more effective than the classic newsletter. As a result, people feel heard and gain a sense of ownership in the solutions they come up with, thereby building a new kind of brand affinity.

UserVoice is accelerating its push to redefine how organizations engage customers with the following:

New funding. Drawn to the UserVoice vision, Baseline Ventures recently led a group of angel investors in an $800,000 funding round. Baseline was joined in a Series A round by FF Angel LLC (seed investing vehicle for Founders Fund), Betaworks, David Shen Ventures, The Accelerator Group, Net Discovery LLC, and Howard Lindzon. As a group, the angels provide UserVoice excellent business connections; expertise in messaging, marketing, and design; and international exposure.

New white-label widget and ZeroLogin SSO. UserVoice is introducing the first interactive widget for customer feedback that can be branded to coincide with a company''s look and feel. Companies can also add or remove sections of functionality or change the actual layout of the widget and the language. For end users, the new widget allows people to easily search, vote, and submit bug reports directly on the host site. Along with this, UserVoice is unveiling ZeroLogin, a new method of single sign on that eliminates the need for users to create a new login and password for UserVoice - allowing them to seamlessly move between a company website and a UserVoice forum. By combining the new widget with ZeroLogin, companies greatly improve the user experience and increase the level of feedback they receive.

New advisor. As the former vice president of communities and conversations at Dell Inc., Bob Pearson bolsters the hands-on, enterprise credibility at UserVoice. At Dell, Pearson led IdeaStorm, developing an industry-leading approach to the use of social media that included 25 blogs, forums and wikis in seven languages worldwide with 200 million page views of annual interaction. He also coordinated the company’s approach in Twitter, Facebook and other key sites.

New customers. UserVoice has hundreds of paying customers in multiple vertical markets that run the gamut from technology, government, healthcare, education and retail. New customers include companies of all sizes including Intuit, NASA, Facebook, Xing, Nielson, Genentech, Blackbaud, University of Wisconsin, Animoto, Seesmic, StumbleUpon and TweetDeck.

Businesses Find Their Unique UserVoice

Companies can also leverage UserVoice internally to crowdsource ideas from employees on various projects. This same feedback approach can be applied in a number of different vertical markets as well - university administrators can discuss funding issues with students; politicians can work with their constituents on new propositions; and rock bands can connect with their fans about what they''d like to see on tour.

Since UserVoice is easy to configure, any organization can integrate and launch within a day or two for as long or as little a duration of time as needed. The flexibility lets administrators generate an “ideas anywhere” solution to complement existing efforts or create new channels of feedback. UserVoice is optimized for fast, affordable deployments that don’t require a lot of planning or resources from IT departments, offering an end-to-end white label solution - branded, domain-alias, single sign on, and with open APIs for creating unique, custom integrations.

“A company’s most powerful asset is the knowledge of its employees and its customers. It is also one of the most untapped resources on the planet!” said Marcus Nelson, co-founder of UserVoice. “UserVoice is democratizing the idea generation model, so companies can plug and play at their convenience, gain feedback from customers, and do so without a major investment of IT resources. It’s very complementary to the great work of Salesforce.com for IdeaStorm and, in many cases, will extend the reach of existing idea communities worldwide.”

Pearson added, “Two major trends favor the UserVoice approach. The first trend is that three out of four people look to their peers before they make a purchase decision. The second is that conversations are occurring further from companies’ websites due to the high growth of social media. Those companies who embrace the knowledge of their customers and partner with them throughout the web will benefit from better ideas and relationships.”

For more information on UserVoice, please visit http://uservoice.com.
For additional perspectives, please visit the UserVoice blog at http://blog.uservoice.com.
Follow UserVoice on Twitter at @uservoice.

About UserVoice

UserVoice began in 2007 as a simple way to prioritize feature requests, reinventing the way companies engaged customers. Today, UserVoice continues to capitalize on crowd-sourced voting to simplify the aggregation of untapped knowledge from employees, constituents and consumers. UserVoice is revolutionizing the industry with its real-time, “Ideas Anywhere” solution, making idea generation not only easy to integrate, but so cost-effective that any size company or organization can redefine how they learn, share and evolve their offerings. For more information on UserVoice, please visit http://uservoice.com.

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Contact:

Marisa Lam, media relations for UserVoice
TECHMarket Communications
650.544.3350
Marisa@TECHMarket.com

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News Facts

Baseline Ventures, FF Angel & Betaworks lead angel funding investment.
New white-label widget and ZeroLogin single-sign-on solution can be branded and deployed within minutes.
Ex-Dell IdeaStorm VP, Bob Pearson joins advisory board.
New customers include Intuit, Facebook, NASA, University of Wisconsin, Xing, Blackbaud & Animoto.