This article was published on October 7, 2008

Kampyle lowers the barrier of giving feedback


Kampyle lowers the barrier of giving feedback

Almost everybody is eager for feedback. Although the positive remarks are pleasant, in the end it’s all about the criticism. Like Paul Arden, marketing visionary who died this year, once said: “Seek criticism, not praise”. I’m more than happy to hear that you like our news selection, but if there’s something bugging you every time you come here, I rather learn about that.

Israel-based Yossi Vardi start-up Kampyle will help you gather that so-wanted feedback. It’s a tool for webmasters and software developers to gather remarks easily, as Kampyle lowers the barriers for giving feedback. Partly by presenting a Feedback button on every page and also with their very user-friendly forms.

I had an interesting Skype chat with co-founder Eran Savir today. He told me they started developing the service in 2007, went in closed beta in March 2008, and are publicly available since July. That was just the website version, which has 3000 customers world wide. But Kampyle now broadens its target group by launching a new application today, aimed at software developers.

25 percent of software installs go wrong

Savir: “Of all the people who start a software installation, 25 percent decides to cancel it. That means every software developer misses 25 percent of its potential users for reasons unknown. They don’t even know where in the installation process the user pressed the cancel button”.

Where did it go wrong?

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Kampyle aims to give more info about these unsatisfied users. Therefor they developed a tool that leads people who’ve just pressed cancel to a feedback page. You can see it for yourself at Mailinfo.com, an email tracking tool that has been testing the Kampyle tool for a while. “About 5 percent of the people who canceled the installation posted feedback”.

Although this doesn’t seem much at first hand, it’s better than nothing. Thanks to the clear and well-designed admin panels of Kampyle, you can easily spot certain trends in feedback. What’s the most problematic place? What’s the most reported feedback on that page? Painful places show up pretty fast (Click for a larger version).

Stay personal

The Kampyle dashboard also contains the option to email all the feedback submitters back by using a email client with a BCC field. If I were you though, I’d send a direct message. Why would you screw it up in the end with a not so personal email if you’ve taken all the trouble to fix a problem?

Let’s start using the web version

Although Savir showed me around in the program, I can only write a good review when I’ve tested Kampyle on you, dear reader. So consider this to be a news post about their new software application and expect a extensive review of the Kampyle web tool later. You can register for the software version here.

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