We all know it’s far easier to get more business from an existing, happy customer than it is to make a new sale. It hurts when a customer chooses to take his or her business elsewhere. So how can a business owner truly know if a recent customer has had a good experience? Portland-based startup Opiniator has come up with a solution that invites customers to immediately use their mobile devices to give their feedback (scores, comparisons, benchmarks, ideas) about a business while they are still in the restaurant, store or utilizing the service.
Opiniator’s goal is to become the leading “moment of truth” feedback and performance management system using mobile and internet surveys. As part of our continuing series of interviews with entrepreneurs, we asked Opiniator founder Matt Selbie to share a little insight on the startup’s game-changing methodology for collecting customer feedback.
Question: Tell us a little about Opiniator.
Answer: Opiniator is customer feedback technology, delivered as SaaS, that helps prevent customers defecting from any business. This means the business can grow its cash flow and protect its reputation by ALWAYS delivering what its customers want. Opiniator does this by delivering real-time, actionable, point of experience customer feedback with analysis and alerts, using the customers’ personal cell phones. The company is two years old and based in Portland.
Matt Selbie
Question: What gave you the idea to tie mobile technology with customer feedback and target it at hospitality/retail venues?
Answer: Most customer feedback methods are flawed. They deliver too little data, too late after the event, that’s too complex or too expensive. The greatest problem is that the generated feedback is not actionable, i.e., it’s not immediately leading to corrective action – so why collect feedback in the first place? We decided that the mobile device was the only way real customers could use something they are familiar with to give feedback at the point of experience. The cell phone is the ideal input device as it offers a choice of feedback methods – voice, text and web – so it’s highly convenient and can reach 100 percent of the customer base.
Hospitality/retail was the main focus when Opiniator was launched, as these industries seemed the most overt in their desire for customer feedback. We now serve healthcare and other professional services markets.
Question: Is the startup operating solely in the Portland area?
Answer: No. We have clients in many states.
Question: What are your plans for expansion – and will you seek outside funding for this?
Answer: We have realized that the Opiniator platform has wider utility in several industries, so now we are working to raise money to develop a world class sales and marketing organization to complement what we think is a special technology that solves a really big problem most businesses suffer from.
Question: In the highly competitive field of restaurant dining, having an edge – in this case, immediate customer feedback via Opiniator – would seem to be vital. Yet, we all know that many food & beverage establishments run on such a tight profit margin that new technology tools are often at the bottom of the purchasing list. What’s the most effective sales pitch for countering this problem? Are you expanding your target markets to help grow Opiniator?
Answer: The pitch is straightforward and revolves around the existing defection rates of the business and/or the market. For example, in the restaurant business, annual defection can be over 30 percent; that is, 30 percent of customers try it once , never to return. The reason and correction could be delivered via appropriate customer feedback, but this rarely happens. So the pitch is that Opiniator can help solve customer defection, which always provides a higher economic payoff than any customer acquisition tactic — it’s much more profitable to retain your base than to spend money on acquiring new customers.
As stated earlier, our target markets now include healthcare, field services, professional services, retail and events.
Question: We noted that you’ve got an outreach campaign to potential clients running on Twitter. Are you finding Twitter an effective way to reach new business targets?
Answer: Twitter is a developing tactic for us – we have not yet figured out its full potential. We use it as an awareness generating mechanism BUT also search for certain keywords…in our case, “comment cards,” “customer feedback,” “mystery shopper,” etc. We’re not engaging potential customers at this point, but rather use it as a way to identify, then pursue through other means.
[...] The good folks at VoxusPR in Tacoma have been good enough to do a write up on OPINIATOR, what we do and what we solve. It’s a good summary of why we exist and how the technology we have continues to help businesses stop customer defection by providing real-time point of experience customer feedback, with integrated analysis and alerts. The full article can be read here. [...]
[...] The good folks at VoxusPR in Tacoma have been good enough to do a write up on OPINIATOR, what we do and what we solve. It’s a good summary of why we exist and how the technology we have continues to help businesses stop customer defection by providing real-time point of experience customer feedback, with integrated analysis and alerts. The full article can be read here. [...]