IdeaScale Ushers in the Age of Real Time Customer Feedback

New recipe for customer feedback success: one cup of the wisdom of crowds, a dash of Digg, and simmer with community to bring new ideas to life.

Seattle, WA (PRWEB) April 21, 2008 -- Getting customers to share their insights has long been a challenge for companies. Surveys can be intrusive and time-consuming to administer while market research panels are expensive to organize and do not provide the immediacy required by the real-time economy. Survey Analytics, a leading provider of online market research tools, today unveiled the public beta of IdeaScale, a new community-based portal that enables companies of all sizes to harness the "wisdom of crowds" on their own website to improve their product or service.

"In the competitive world of hospitality lodging, it's not just enough to simply solicit customer feedback -- there needs to be a mechanism to turn that feedback into real business intelligence that can be quickly incorporated into our various properties," said John Thompson, Director of Hotel Performance Training for Choice Hotels. "The concept of IdeaScale is appealing to us as it provides a relatively simple way to canvas customer opinions and then give those same customers a voice to watch their ideas come to life. We are excited to be one of the initial beta testers of the IdeaScale service and believe it represents one of the new frontiers in customer feedback technologies."

Our goal with IdeaScale is to help facilitate an authentic conversation between companies and their most important constituency - their customers. No company can succeed in the long term without actively listening to what their customers want and now with IdeaScale, any company can put the power of real-time feedback to work for them.

With the recent launch of MyStarbucksIdea.com and success of Dell's IdeaStorm feedback portal, customers are now being offered a dynamic forum to voice their opinions and see their ideas blossom into action. By embracing a crowdsourcing model, a company's community of users can easily promote the best ideas to the top, in a manner similar to that of Digg. Pricing for IdeaScale will be free for the initial beta period and will continue to be free for individual websites and bloggers following the conclusion of the public beta .

"A lot of companies talk about listening to their customers but are they really hearing what they're saying?" asks Vivek Bhaskaran, CEO and Founder of Survey Analytics, the company that developed IdeaScale. "Our goal with IdeaScale is to help facilitate an authentic conversation between companies and their most important constituency - their customers. No company can succeed in the long term without actively listening to what their customers want and now with IdeaScale, any company can put the power of real-time feedback to work for them."

About Survey Analytics, LLC
Survey Analytics is a leading developer of online market research tools designed to help companies across all industries gain practical customer insight. The company's flagship service, QuestionPro.com, offers market research software for the creation, distribution and analysis of electronic surveys. Thousands of market-leading companies have utilized QuestionPro's Web-based survey software for their market research initiatives. The company is headquartered in Seattle and privately held. More information can be found at the company's website at www.surveyanalytics.com

Press Contact:
Robert Nachbar, Kismet Communications, 206-427-0389, rob @ kismetcommunications.net

###