As Startups, it is very important to interact and get feedback, suggestions, opinions from customers, especially with customer service playing a huge role in the modern day company. It is essential to be equipped with tools that can help your company bridge that gap. I decided to list 7 tools that can help startups get up and running in no time.

Hope it makes a difference in your startup.

Survey monkey

Survey Monkey is a site that let users create surveys for customers, you can create polls and surveys to get valuable data from your prospects and customers in no time, an easy set-up process, you don’t have to be a tech geek to understand how to use it. With a wide range of surveys for customer service such as online product feedback, business to business, software evaluation and new product announcement.

Formspring

It is probably used more by authors and online personalities to answer questions from their respective fan base but what says you can’t use it for your company.

Formspring can be a great way to build or intensify relationships between consumers and brands. Formspring creates a comfortable and informal space for people to ask questions easily. Eliminating inbox clutter and repetitive inquiries.

Quora

Quora is one of the hottest startup at the moment and it would be a shame for your company to miss out on the buzz or opportunity to use the platform to increase efficiency in your company.

Although Quora is against companies doing this because there are strict rules that you can’t setup an account with an organization’s name and that you must use your real name but i think there is no harm in getting a representative from your company to get involved in quora and through that method increase the brand awareness of the company and answer questions from customers. A great way for companies to deliver customer service by responding to complaints and criticisms

Twitter

It is a great way to get instant feedback from customers and connect with customers. You can use twitter to search for your company name and involve yourself in a conversation if a potential customer is finding it hard to understand its use of a product/service or a customer finding difficulties with the service.

I had a friend a few weeks tell me she was having trouble with her virgin media services, she decided she was going to cancel it, but wanted to try a different route and tweet the company with her complaint for the last time and within minutes, they quickly replied her, apologised and got someone to call her to have the issue re-solved. To think that she was having diffulties reaching them for weeks and through twitter they could instantly respond and offer that instant customer service, they dint just only keep a customer but also enhanced their brand and customer relationship.

Kiss Insights

Collecting feedback is a vital part of the rendering of any service, this is exactly what kiss insights does, it allows customers tell you what they need, cool right? Creating products or services that your customers actually want.
You can easily manage all of your questions directly from your dashboard. Kiss insights is a quick and easy solution for generating surveys for your web site visitors.

Uservoice

Uservoice is an online application where your customers can go to make suggestions or give feedback. UserVoice allows your customers to vote on feedback and ideas submitted in the customer community.
UserVoice products include UserVoice Feedback, a hosted tool for gathering and prioritizing product ideas directly from a business’s customer base and UserVoice Full Service, a hosted, customer engagement solution that bundles Feedback and support capabilities into a single, easy-to-manage environment.

GetSatisfaction

Get Satisfaction help companies builds online communities that will enable productive conversations between them and their customers.
Customers can post their own questions, ideas, problems, or conversations about a product and employees from the companies moderate the boards.

Hope this helps…..

Every startup or new businesses are always looking for the best way to be cost-effective or not spend at all, luckily for us, we’re in the age where technology has made it so much easier for startups/small businesses to launch with little or no money and still survive, better yet, grow into big companies.

I have decided to write a list of tools which i believe can help any startup, or give it some kind of backbone till the money starts coming in for more advanced tools or softwares.

Hope this helps you in some way.

Skype -Conferencing / Networking / Customer Support

For a while now, using skype for me has been like using my mobile phone, been very instrumental for speaking to entrepreneurs or having video chats, great for mini-conferences or speaking to workers and clients.
you can set up local phone numbers in multiple countries that all ring through to one account, answer your calls from anywhere in the world that you have a Web connection, hold conference calls, route calls through to certain cell phones and so on.

Linkedin

Great for scouting employees, tracking down potential clients and investors. A great way to build and expand the business network of the company/getting the word out what about the company does.

Facebook

Creating a facebok page/fan page can be an effective way of quickly driving traffic or gaining exposure for your business, a lot of people may argue about the return of having a lot of people on your fanpage with no significant jump in profits or sales, i say it is a free tool that doesnt cost anything, why not right?

Twitter

Twitter has proven to be a major tool for companies to sell products, direct traffic to their websites, blogs, you name. Also a great way to connect with clients, investors, employees, you name it, just tweet it!

Mailchimp

To send e-mails to customers, if you want to use more than your typical e-mail application, mailchimp is the hottest email-marketing provider so far.

MailChimp gives you a web-based tool for managing e-mail lists and designing e-mail newsletters and fliers. The web-based mailing list manager MailChimp offers list management, tracking and analysis, and custom HTML templates for up to 1,000 subscribers and 6000 emails a month for free, after that payments kick in

Meetup

For new startups looking to meet other entrepreneurs, investors or just to get involved in the startup/small businesscommunity, there’s no better place for you to start than meetup.com, select events according to your preference, location, great opportunity putting your name or company’s name out there, opportunity to meet journalists and bloggers.

WordPress

Not having a blog or a website as a business right now is like not-existing, yes it’s that serious!
Blogs are great ways for companies to keep in touch and communicate with customers/users. i have also seen blogs being used as a medium to attract investors, a few startups will tell you a story of them getting investors or connections with an investors with a blog post they posted on their blog.

For me, WordPress solves that problem with ease, it has a large user base (great for community support and custom development), loads of plugins, and a huge range of themes, a very easy platform to use.

Scribd

Scribd is a document- sharing website that allows users to post documents of various format and embed into a web page using its ipaper format (almost like the pdf)

This can certainly allow you to share documents with your employees or co-workers.

Gmail

Even though you might argue that there’s a lot of email options out there, but one thing is for sure, gmail offers the best email option option out there with realibility, amazing features and name cache. you also have the option to have VoIP and video chat capabilities via the in built chat systems. This will also give you access to google docs.

Enternships

Enternships offers you the opportunity to attract top students and graduate to your company interning at your company. great way to save some money on costs paying employees, also a great way of building a team, having someone who believes in the company from the start.

Enternships is a great way for employers to connect to enterns.

The entrepreneurial show Dragon’s Den has lost one of its Dragons after business man and entrepreneur James Caan revealed that he would be leaving the show, via Twitter.

He tweeted “After four fantastic seasons, I have made the decision to step down from the panel of the much loved ‘Dragon’s Den’.

“I have seen some excellent entrepreneurs and brilliant ideas and I thank them and all of the dragon’s for making it such great fun.

“I will be focusing on my existing investments and some exciting new projects,” he added.

Rumours of a rift between James Caan and Duncan Bannatyne still exist. The long running spat has been due to Caan’s non-dom status, which exempts him from UK taxes on overseas earnings.

In any case he will be missed from the show and the attention now turns to who will take over!

Michelle Mone, Sir James Dyson or maybe Michael O’Leary. Well it will certainly get viewers watching although I doubt O’Leary will be interested.

Who do you think will replace James Caan?

James Caan – The Real Deal: My Story from Brick Lane to Dragons’ Den

Sarah Prevette is the founder of Sprouter, a collaboration tool for entrepreneurs where they can share knowledge and communicate with other entrepreneurs.

So what is so unique about it? Well it is focused towards expanding the network of entrepreneurs specifically. The primary aim is to connect with those you do not know, rather than other applications which are either socially focused or mainly about maintaining relationships with people you were already connected to.

This is not Sarah’s first start up, she also founded upinion.com, a tween pop culture community. She found it more of a struggle not having entrepreneurial peers around her and so this was the bases for Redwire which rebranded as Sprouter in 2009. It also now takes on a Twitter like format where users can only use 140 characters. Sprouter currently has over 15,000 users and is rapidly growing.

Sarah is also a bit of a philantrapist and she helps spearhead the ‘Twestival Toronto’ event every year. It is an event which brings together Twitter communities from around the as part of a fundraising initiative. Twestivals are held in many locations and Sarah’s Twestival in Toronto raised $20,000 of the $460,000 total.

Sarah’s favourite thing about being an entrepreneur ‘is the privilege of spending each moment of your life working on your passion.’

Some advice from Sarah for budding entrepreneurs, well first of all, “Just go for it”, take the leap, you have to take the risk to have a chance of making it big.

Also “you are going to fail, just know that and accept it before you start!”

You will always come across problems but learn from it and adapt, nothing goes to plan, but the quicker you adapt to change the more successful you will be and it is the same whether you are working 9 -5 or you have your own start up.

“Isolation Kills” is another piece of advice from Sarah. In other words take advice, bounce ideas, get opinions, ask questions, people are a valuable resource so use them, they want to give their opinions, you never know it might be useful!

Sarah has expanded her team to four and they will no doubt grow larger in the future as Sprouters popularity picks up more and more.

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Soraya Darabi is the founder of social networking food site Foodspotting. The site lets you find and upload specific dishes as opposed to restaurants. Foodspotting allows you to take a picture of the dish you’re eating and upload it to the website as well as giving you a chance to find some interesting dishes when visiting someplace new.

Soraya seeks her success through social media as shown by her career to date.

Soraya founded Foodspotting less than a year ago (at the time of writing), in December 2009 and has seen rapid growth on the website. The site is one that can only get better, as the more people join the more enriched range of foods and locations will be available. Foodspotting is great for casual and passionate users and has a twitter style follow option as well as a points system.

Prior to Foodspotting a 23 year old Darabi found herself with a job at The NY Times where she implemented social media integration for The NY times including a presence on Facebook and Twitter. Her social media prowess led her to winning first prize at the INMA Awards for excellence in marketing.

This determined young entrepreneur is pushing the way forward for other young female entrepreneurs, “We need more young women starting companies” she says, and with over half a million followers on twitter there are plenty of people listening.

Soraya was given the accolade of 53rd place in the top 100 most creative people in business 2010 list. She is the social media queen and always seems to know where the social media trends are, why?

“I get information from my peers,” Darabi says simply.

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The carbon footprint of Twitter users is set to be dramatically reduced after the social networking site began integrating a simple “retweet” button to save users having to exert the extra energy necessary to type the letters “RT”.

Retweeting is when users can share interesting tweets made by people they follow, with their own following, using the syntax RT.

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Staff who use Twitter and other social networking sites while at work are costing UK businesses £1.38bn every year, a report has said.

Over half of those surveyed admitted using social networking sites during the working day for personal use.

On average those people spent 40 minutes per week on these sites.

IT services group Morse, who commissioned the research, said that such online behaviour clearly had a “productivity strain” on firms.

The survey questioned 1,460 office workers.

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Twitter is working on a way to automate its retweet process to enable smoother and more comprehensive access to information across the popular micro-blogging site, according to a new blog posting.

Biz Stone, co-founder of the site, wrote yesterday that the firm intends to “formalise” the process of retweeting so that users do not need to manually copy and paste tweets to share them with their own followers.
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“Retweeting is a great example of Twitter teaching us what it wants to be,” he wrote.

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TwitVid.com , lets iPhone 3GS owners post videos they’ve taken directly from the device.

Users can record a new video, or choose from an existing one in their libraries. It also features a handy upload bar to let you know how far the video has to go before it’s done. The big twist is that TwitVid’s got some technology running on its end that lets your followers start watching the clip before it’s even done uploading.

Has anyone tried it yet?