UserVoice

UserVoice is a San Francisco–based Software-as-a-Service ( SaaS ) company that develops customer engagement tools.

History
UserVoice began in 2006, when programmer Richard White decided to create a way to monitor feedback from software users. He created an online forum for users to provide ideas about a project he was designing. White asked users to vote, instead of using programmers, a method inspired by Joel Spolsky, who advocated giving programmers a finite number of votes to prioritize software development. In February 2008, White, along with Lance Ivy and Marcus Nelson, launched UserVoice. An early adopter was Stack Overflow, run by Spolsky. UserVoice had 13 employees and 4,000 clients, with 23 million users participating by 2011.

Products
UserVoice Feedback collects and prioritizes suggestions from customers as they list ideas and vote on them. This voting can occur through the SmartVote comparison testing feature. In addition, to the original website-style product, iPhone and Facebook apps are available to allow developers to collect feedback for mobile apps.

UserVoice HelpDesk is a support tool for tracking and responding to customer issues. Customers can thank the support person who responds to their ticket by giving them "kudos." The system employs gamification techniques to motivate support teams to provide high-quality service. Help teams work within a system that displays each person's kudos in real-time. UserVoice HelpDesk directs customers to relevant answers as they type questions.