What’s all this guff about mobile?

BoomVox! ©

Customer Underground is moving into mobile territory. We’ve heard from so many of you that you want a way to easily review on the go, so now we’re taking the plunge.  We are growing up a little, and with that, are discovering new ways to empower the movement and get our voices heard more than ever. So here’s the skinny – more details (and how to get the app) coming soon, but for now... 

Meet BoomVox!

Named after the idea of amplifying your voice, BoomVox is the name of the new app. Oh, and when we play scrabble, we will also get a very dandy score!

Its scientific name would be boomvoxrusiphoneapplicatweetasaurus.

Fortunately, instead of living in a botany book, BoomVox will spend its first phase of life in the Apple iPhone application store. We will be moving to android in future, but for now it was easy to choose one platform, and get your feedback on what works, what features you want, then move from there. Powered by Twitter, BoomVox will also link your feedback to our Twitter, to your own if you want- as well as going straight to a business’s HQ to help improve their performance.

We’ve mellowed as we have gotten older

Customer Underground was founded to empower people to stand up for the kind of customer experience they were entitled to. We wanted you to be able to dodge a bullet and find a gem by gaining access to reliable world of mouth. That same ethos remains as we venture into mobile, but we have also recognised it doesn’t have to be about shaking a fist. Sometimes just voicing an opinion is enough to really influence change. Humour also helps defuse a situation or helps businesses get more patrons through funny and entertaining reviews. So in BoomVox, we lose our fist but we gain a mouth piece– shown in a very kissable pair of lips.

We do it for the love, but need to keep on living too

BoomVox is a saleable product. The reality is Customer Underground needs to have some cash in the kitty in order to keep running as a full time operation and get you better results as a consumer. Businesses will pay to have full access to our app’s features whilst you our dear mavens, will not. This is not about selling out or trying to make a quick buck and it certainly won’t cheapen your experience or restrict your honesty. The reality is businesses spend $100’s of thousands of dollars each year on customer service training, in-store mystery shopping programmes, focus groups and so on . In short,  most give a damn about what their customers think _good and bad. Right now, they don’t necessarily get the right data because people are paid for opinions or the companies that manage the feedback gathering have a vested interest in skewing it to their purposes. BoomVox is a way to change this by giving REAL customers a voice – and getting it straight back to businesses. Your opinion will go to the businesses and help them design the kind of customer experience you want. Considering how valuable that is to a business, we believe this model is commercially viable and in turn help the Underground live, and grow.  As always, we insist on preserving the integrity of the Customer Underground community and making sure YOU can say what YOU think openly and honestly – both to businesses and other customers.  

All the smart kids revise

One of the things we’ve noticed is sometimes a business will be an absolute s**t sandwich once, but may pick up their game later on. Or they may be brilliant in the first instance and then become lazy and sluggish. We know it’s hard to review the same business and revise that opinion on our current site, and BoomVox is designed to solve this: you can rate a business as many times as you like, and revise that opinion as the conditions change.

But I already have writers block!

We know most of you on the site read rather than write reviews. We’ve also heard that some of you feel it’s daunting to write a big chunk of content and leave it bare for all to see. BoomVox is about short comments – about the size of the average Tweet –or you can simply rate thumbs up or thumbs down. Either way, your feedback is counted. Yep, it really is that simple.    

Is it ready yet?

Baby steps are always the best way to go- so we will soon announce the super awesome details of our pilot, soon to be ready for takeoff. We have a simply delicious way to start the mobile jaunt.  Want to find out more?  Register here and keep your eyes peeled for upcoming newsletters for further clues. 

Have you got questions, comments, ideas, complaints, suggestions and ways to skin the mobile cat? Make them known in the box below this blog!