FOCUS on the Arts , occurring every other year since 1964, has been a catalyst for many careers, the inspiration for lifelong interest in the arts and produced many famous faces along the way.  And for a few days (and select night programs too) during FOCUS, students are able to participate in a variety of events including hands-on workshops, demonstrations, lectures and performances. Many of the students are stars of their own showcase, performing or displaying their own art or talents. Students attend up to six sessions a day centered around architecture, art, creative writing, dance, media, music, social justice and drama.

Sitting in the audience during one of the improv sessions, it was awe-inspiring to listen to students sing, question and discuss their dreams, aspirations and interests not only with the speakers, but with their peers as well. Frankly, it made me wonder why every school across the country doesn’t have this type of line-up front and center in their curriculum.

This year we were lucky enough, not just to be watchful members of the audience, but to be the technology that powered speaker feedback for the 200+ session lineup for this year’s program. OpinionLab’s speaker feedback allowed students, volunteers, staff and community members to leave feedback for each speaker session in real-time from a tablet or mobile device, or at their convenience from their home laptop or desktop computer. This platform allowed FOCUS to collect over 1,400 valuable pieces of feedback in just three days, and set the stage for the future speakers for years to come.

At the end of the day, it’s people that drive brand conversations. Giving people the opportunity to leave feedback improves experiences, people, companies and even high schools. In this case, we were proud to be a part of this program and can’t wait to see what the team at FOCUS brings to the next program.

September 30-October 2, 2013
Chicago, IL

The Shop.org Annual Summit is a 2½ day event where digital and multichannel retailers build relationships, discuss what works, explore what ifs and plant the seeds for what’s next in retail. In 2013, more than 4,000 digital and multichannel retail professionals and 200 exhibitors will gather in Chicago for the Summit. Speakers, panelists and attendees are some of the brightest and most innovative players in the digital retail world.

Visit OpinionLab as we help retailers figure out how to drive brand conversations in the omnichannel world in Booth #347. We’ll see you there.

Cutting-edge VoC solutions enable retailers to be visible and accessible throughout the entire browsing, consideration and buying journey, which is increasingly sporadic and spans a variety of digital and physical touch points.

Head on over to Retail TouchPoints and checkout our latest whitepaper, Applying VoC To The New Omnichannel Customer Journey, to learn how harnessing customer feedback across all channels can drive customer loyalty and sales.

While consumers love to shop on their tablets, the experience still falls short of their expectations.

Retailers that act now to improve the tablet shopping experience– enhancing browsing and making purchasing easier– can jump ahead of the competition. Read on for four strategies retailers can use to nail their tablet shopping strategies.

Get ready. We’ve arrived at eMetrics San Francisco and we’re really looking forward to it.

eMetrics Summit is “Big Data for Marketing!” From early adopters leading the effort to those still in discovery mode, this is the only comprehensive event dedicated to digital analytics and marketing optimization.

As a Diamond Level Sponsor, you’ll find OpinionLab front and center at the event. Besides driving brand conversations on the floor at Booth #107, you can also find our success stories being told through our clients’ eyes. On April 16th at 8:50am-9:10am, James Niehaus, Director of Optimization and Analytics, will explain how Symantec built and scaled their global VoC program. You’ll find him in Golden Gate Room B, and then after the talk at our Booth.

CareerBuilder.com has been living and breathing real-time feedback for a long time. We recently had a chance to sit with Liz Pastor, the Vice President of CareerBuilder.com Product to get her thoughts on how to deliver a great customer experience to web and increasingly, mobile users.

OL: Give us a little background on your business and how you’ve structured your tech and team to make the most of VoC?

Liz: CareerBuilder has the largest online job site in the U.S., but we’re more than just a job board. We are the global leader in human capital solutions. So we need to capture feedback from two very different sides of our business: job seekers who are applying for jobs and employers who are posting jobs and finding a match for open positions.

CareerBuilder.com utilizes OpinionLab’s unique, opt-in implementation for both employers and job seekers – and we have deployed comment cards on every single page of our site. We also rely on OpinionLab to capture feedback within email newsletters to help us better find and prepare job recommendation results for those receiving newsletters. We also use event-driven comment cards to determine user paths – all in order to help us improve and tailor the best experience possible for our customers.

My team has two dedicated web analysts that are responsible for examining, categorizing and disseminating data. They work with various groups across the company, from Customer Care Departments to technical teams to the C-suite, to make sure we are taking full advantage of all the things we learn from our customers.

OL: As feedback streams in, what have you learned? Have there been any surprise insights?

Liz: Individual comments and feedback trends are a tremendous tool to pinpoint quick fixes that make a big difference to our customers. For example, we used this feedback to standardize our password requirements to make passwords easier to remember, but just as secure.

OL:  How does VoC stack up against more traditional research tools like surveys or focus groups?

Liz: Let me answer that through the lens of our job seekers. We aim to deliver the best possible experience to more than 24 million unique visitors who come to CareerBuilder every month to find new jobs and obtain career advice. We have a presence in 60 markets worldwide – and more and more of these people are using mobile to job hunt. How do you effectively tap into feedback at that scale – and at the speed of online recruitment?

We began using OpinionLab tools to give our job seekers a voice. We previously utilized approaches like focus groups and usability testing for this particular audience, but it wasn’t a tool for a daily line of communication like the OpinionLab solution set. We also found that feedback from this method wasn’t always representative of the feedback of our larger customer-base. Using OpinionLab, we are able to cross-reference and verify any questions or comments brought up in these discussions, ensuring we’re prioritizing and acting on what’s most important to our customers. OpinionLab also allows us to gather feedback in real-time, as job seekers and employers are experiencing the site. This feedback allows our teams insight into what is happening ‘in the moment,’ and take swift action as it is necessary. We also gather feedback from various countries and languages – helping to further pinpoint and tailor to our customers needs.

OL: You brought up mobile.  What’s been CareerBuilder.com’s experience with mobile as part of an omnichannel strategy?

Liz: Our mobile story is a fascinating one. We’ve watched job seekers move from the desktop more toward the laptop and to smartphones. Applying for a job is easy on a desktop, especially when it comes to attaching your resume to a post, but when you look at mobile devices, how do you add or update a resume or cover letter? The entire customer experience changes when it comes to mobile, and it’s changing fast. Around one-third of our site traffic is mobile, which has more than doubled since last year alone and we’re centering our efforts around making the mobile experience an even better experience.

OL:  What is the key to delivering a standout mobile experience?

Liz: We’ve got one of the best mobile experiences in the business, and certainly of any job board. You can apply to jobs instantly via your phone with a saved resume. If you don’t have a resume on file, you can fill out a brief form with questions about your background (it takes around one minute), so the employer can capture your information. There’s a host of other mobile features as well, but we’re always looking to be better. We’re noticing a huge amount of traffic applying for a job from a mobile site, and from a strategic point of view we’ve had to re-examine our key performance indicators (KPIs) to account for the change in job seeker behavior. We’re trying to think about not only how to define and group our mobile data, but how to read the story that mobile will tell us. We’ve just launched OpinionLab’s mobile feedback solution and we couldn’t be more excited to marry the data with real-time streaming feedback.

CareerBuilder.com is the global leader in human capital solutions. Through constant innovation, unparalleled technology and customer care delivered at every touch point, CareerBuilder helps match the right talent with the right opportunity more often than any other site.
 

Liz Pastor is the vice president of CareerBuilder.com Product at CareerBuilder and specializes in online product management and product development.