"It's our belief that in a lot of cases when someone has a bad experience, they want someone to hear them, they want their voice to be heard," Wall said. When customers respond to the initial feedback email by saying they've had bad experiences, Signpost directs them back to the companies with which they interacted, so that the business owners can try to address what went wrong in private before the consumers post negative reviews. On the flip side, Signpost tries to head off customers from leaving negative reviews on such sites. how many people will take the time to leave that feedback," Wall said. If the process of leaving a review is made that simple, "it's remarkable. If they've had a good experience, it sends them a link to a review site that allows them, when they click on it, to immediately post their comments. The company starts by soliciting feedback from consumers soon after their purchases or interactions with its small business clients. ![]() But Signpost has found that consumers are much more likely to leave a review if it makes the process easier for them. The customer has to seek out a review site and then find the business on the site. In part, that's because it can be difficult. People don't often leave reviews of businesses unless they're particularly motivated to do so - they had awful or extraordinarily good experience they're family members or friends with the owner or they own a rival business. Signpost focuses on helping customers improve their ratingsĪ big part of Signpost's offering is designed to help small businesses improve their ratings on sites such as Yelp, Google, and Facebook, said Wall, the startup's founder and CEO. It then uses that information to send messages to those customers, soliciting feedback from them after purchases and asking them to post reviews or refer the companies to their friends. Signpost creates a database of their customers from existing contact information the companies already have on file, from the phone and email interactions they have with customers, and from transaction data. The New York company has crafted its system so that new clients can join easily - within five minutes, Wall said. Its service is designed specifically for small and medium-sized businesses. Nor have there been a lot of marketing or customer retention tools designed for such companies Salesforce and services like it generally target much larger corporations. Many such companies simply don't have the people or resources to keep close track of or market to their customers, Wall said. While big corporations often have sizeable sales and marketing departments, such tasks often fall to the business owner - or to no one at all - in small companies. So he formed Signpost to help such companies find new customers and retain the ones they already have. The experience helped give him an idea for a startup that would help small businesses like his sister's studio with marketing. "It was super-complicated and a total waste of money," Wall said.īut the marketing effort wasn't a complete loss, at least not for Wall. ![]() The result, he told Business Insider in an interview this week, was a disaster. While Stuart Wall was a student at Harvard Business School, he thought he'd help his older sister promote her pottery studio back home in Indiana by buying ads on Google. The company recently raised $52 million in venture funding using the pitch deck below.Signpost helps clients easily build a database of their customers and helps them interact with and solicit reviews from them.Stuart Wall, the startup's founder and CEO, got the idea for it after having a bad experience trying to market his sister's pottery business on Google. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |