Understanding Your Customers

Geeking out about understanding your customers, making them happy, and profiting from it.

Please welcome our new developer and designer hires

in News by Evan Hamilton

Our team continues to grow and I’m very excited to introduce you to three new members!

Austin TaylorAustin Taylor will be joining our Raleigh office and working on our iOS SDK (in fact, he just launched our v1 of the iOS SDK). Austin plays the piano and enjoys programming in Haskell and Clojure. The reason his photo is different from the others is because we haven’t had a chance to photograph him...because he and his wife just had a baby girl!

 

Chad BerceaChad Bercea is a graphic designer who is joining UserVoice to provide much-needed help with marketing collateral (he created our recent Community Manager ...

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I can haz feedback? How Cheezburger found their customer voice

in Case Studies by Evan Hamilton

itty bitty kitteh commity customr service open 24 hrs but only awake 14 hoursOne might imagine that if your business was to publish pictures of cats with captions, customer service wouldn't be a big focus.

But for Cheezburger -- home of I Can Has Cheezburger, Know Your Meme, FAIL Blog and other humor sites -- the end-goal is a sustainable, passionate, and happy community. And customer service is a key part of that.

“Cheezburger's mission is to make the world happy for 5 minutes a day and we rely on our community to help us achieve this," says John Clayton, developer at Cheezburger. "Providing customer engagement tools such as UserVoice on our sites allows the ...

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Introducing: auto-save for UserVoice tickets

in New Features by Evan Hamilton

There's nothing worse than writing a response to a customer and then losing it. Maybe you got signed out, maybe you clicked somewhere else...it doesn't matter. That was hard work, and you shouldn't have to do it again!

Today we're proud to announce auto-save for UserVoice. Now we'll automatically save every character you type in the Message or Note field, no matter what you do after typing it. This is available now on all plans. Check out the video, and enjoy!

Community Manager Appreciation Day cards

in For The To Do List by Evan Hamilton

This coming Monday, January 23rd, is Community Manager Appreciation Day: a celebration of those who keep our customers happy, engaged, and in love with our products. We celebrate every year, but we wanted to do something extra-special this year.

We’ve lovingly crafted these cards so you can share your appreciation (and your sense of humor) with the community manager in your life. Tweet 'em, or control-click (right-click on Windows) the JPG or PDF links and choose "Save image as" to download so you can mail 'em out.

You can manage my community any day - Happy Community Manager Appreciation Day

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Training your customer service representative (in 5 steps)

in Scaling Customer Service by Evan Hamilton

This is part of our ongoing series on Scaling Customer Service, based on our Customer Service Scaling Timeline. This month we're covering Stage 5

So, you’ve hired your first full-time customer service rep. You found the right candidate. Now how do you turn them into a lean, friendly, ticket-answering machine?

1. Orientation

man pointing at computer screenA huge part of doing customer service is context. Make sure you’re prepared; Jess Tellford from Zibbet says that they “take note of all the common tasks [the new hire will] be required to perform and document everything.”

Don’t expect to get through it in one go. ...

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Where is customer service going in 2012? Join our panel to find out.

in For The To Do List by Evan Hamilton

panel speakersCustomer service is more and more important. If you're reading this, you probably already know that. So where is it going? How can we make it better? How do we scale it?

We want to get your questions answered. Next Thursday, January 26th, at 1pm PST I'll be moderating a panel entitled "Understanding Customer Service in 2012". I've assembled thought leaders and practioners to answer your questions in a live discussion on Focus. And literally, they'll be your questions: you can visit the event page to post your questions, and those with the most votes will be discussed by our panelists.

See you there!

-Evan Hamilton
Community Manager, UserVoice

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Important Notice:

Issue with inviting users to private forums and adding admins - resolved

in Notices by Evan Hamilton

Early this morning a bug occurred which prevented Admins from adding other Admins to their account, and from inviting users to private forums. When trying to accomplish these actions, you would have seen greyed-out fields preventing you from entering text. These issues were fixed after about 3 hours, once our team spotted them. Everything should be working fine now!

Please do let us know if you're still experiencing any issues.

Have a great weekend,

-Evan Hamilton
Community Manager, UserVoice

New Feature: Custom Statuses (and 5 ways to use them)

in New Features by Evan Hamilton

One of the key features in UserVoice Feedback is the ability to set statuses for ideas. These allow you to keep your customers in the loop about the progress of their ideas and to return their votes to them when you close an idea.

status update

Today we’re giving you even more control with the ability to create custom statuses.

For most companies, the standard Under Review, Planned, Started, Completed, and Declined statuses are just fine. But for many, these are restrictive. Now - thanks to your feedback on the subject - you can create any status in your Feedback Settings:

custom statuses

If you want this ...

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Seesmic Desktop now supports UserVoice

in News by Evan Hamilton

Do you live in Seesmic’s social media desktop app? Do you wish you could manage your UserVoice account in the same slick interface?

Seesmic has a present for you.

Today, longtime UserVoice customers Seesmic announced the launch of a UserVoice plugin for their desktop app. The plugin allows you to view, manage, and respond to ideas and tickets for your UserVoice account...all within Seesmic Desktop.

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5 reasons to be excited about customer service (even if you miss the holidays)

in Scaling Customer Service by Evan Hamilton

This is part of our ongoing series on scaling customer service, based on our Customer Service Scaling Timeline. This month we're covering Stage Five.

christmas tree in the gutterYou’re back from the holidays. You got a break (which, after all, is good for productivity). You ate delicious, home-made food. Maybe you got presents.

And now you have to start answering customer service messages again. Hoo boy.

Having a hard time getting back into the groove? Here’s 5 things to inspire you to answer those customer issues:

You’re gonna make more money

Customer service rep salaries were up by 6.8% in 2010 - despite ...

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