Building Surprisingly Humane Software
Launched in 2008, UserVoice is a San Francisco-based startup focused on empowering customers to speak and companies to understand. We do this by providing hosted feedback forums, which allow customers to create, discuss, and vote for ideas. We do this by providing support systems, which allow you to answer your customers' questions quicker and with less effort. We do this by sharing stories and guidance on our Understanding Your Customers blog. We do this by continuing to build tools with the goal of customer understanding, not deflection, in mind. We do this by listening to our own customers constantly and carefully, to find out what they need. We do this by actually giving a #*$&.
UserVoice was born out of Richard White's frustration trying to understand his customers. In 2006, while working on Kiko.com, Richard was consumed by collecting customer feedback. He wanted to know what people thought of the product, but it involved hours combing through countless forum threads, blog comments and emails and resulted with little to show for his efforts. It was like running on a treadmill and still getting fat. Richard, knowing that there could be a better system, wrote three bullet points down...
- An online forum structured around users providing actionable ideas on how to improve the product
- Users "voting up" the best ideas to the top of the heap
- Extra constraint of having a limited number of votes to spend and so focusing people on what was really important to them
...and went back to work.
18 months later Kiko sold on eBay for roughly a quarter of a million dollars; Richard and Scott decided they had to get off the treadmill and build an elliptical. Today more than 74,000 companies have UserVoice forums.
In 2010, it became clear to UserVoice that the other half of delighting customers was customer support, and the tools that existed were inhumane for customer, employee, or both. In March 2011 UserVoice Helpdesk was launched as a powerful but easy-to-use solution for this issue.
