Our software is designed to help busy professionals save time, money, and resources so they can focus on what matters most: their customers.
Name: ReviewTrackers
Location: Chicago, Illinois
Website: http://www.reviewtrackers.com
Product / Service Offering: Customer feedback software
Co-founder Interviewed: Chris Campbell, Founder and CEO
Other Key Management Team Members: Kevin Kent, COO; Eric Marden, VP of Engineering; Josh Fosburg, VP of Sales; Emily Pamukov, VP of Marketing; Jim Jones, VP of Customer Success
This article is part of our Business Startup Spotlight series featuring entrepreneurs and their companies. We hope that these founders’ interviews will inspire and motivate you as you undertake your own entrepreneurial journey.
Tell us a little about yourself with a focus on what motivates you.
We have a great team at ReviewTrackers. The people who have been part of our growth story are what motivates me and keeps me going. As the leader, I am so excited to work every day with a group of smart, talented, and passionate individuals who believe in what we’re trying to do as an organization.
The great feedback we regularly receive from ReviewTrackers’ customers is also a major source of motivation and inspiration. Our team is lucky enough to have a steady stream of customers who call or e-mail us to say that our software is extremely valuable to their business. Their words affirm the work that we have been doing and will continue to do.
When did you establish your company and where did the idea originate?
In 2012, when I was still working as a digital marketing strategist, one of my clients came to me trying to track their online reviews. They realized that online reviews and customer feedback were critical to their business, particularly in terms of gathering business intelligence, managing online reputation, tracking customer feedback, understanding the customer experience, and identifying problems in their different stores nationwide.
After testing and taking demonstrations of a number of solutions that my client and I had researched on the Internet, we realized we needed to build something new. So I built a team and developed a prototype, with core features that I knew our customers would need, and that was the foundation of what ReviewTrackers is today.
Since the launch in early 2013, we have grown ReviewTrackers as enterprise-level customer feedback software that helps businesses transform the customer experience. The platform collects review data from all the major online review sites to surface customer insights that enable brands to listen to, understand, and make data-driven decisions about what their customers truly need and want.
What need or needs does your company seek to fill for its customers?
Our software is designed to help busy professionals save time, money, and resources so they can focus on what matters most: their customers.
As an all-in-one solution for managing online reviews and customer feedback, ReviewTrackers helps companies create experiences their customers will love. We help streamline their workflow and automate the collection, reporting, and analysis of their reviews and feedback data. We also make it easy for them to request feedback and generate new reviews, as well as dig deeper into what their customers are saying online across all major review websites. ReviewTrackers rolls all this data into our interactive reporting dashboard, where users can quickly gain insights and identify opportunities for improvement.
What is the one thing that sets your company apart from its competitors?
We have a long list of competitive differentiators, like our scalable backend, capability to track all major review sites, industry-leading data accuracy, direct partnerships with online review sites, and text analytics and sentiment analysis tools. But our number one differentiator, I think, is our ability to listen when our customers talk.
At ReviewTrackers, we embrace customer feedback and make a commitment to understanding the customer experience. This is not just the concept or idea that drives our product. It is also the ethos that permeates our entire organizational culture, and is at the heart of everything we do.
Here is an example of how this is manifested. We use customer feedback to identify and design new functionalities or feature enhancements that help better solve our customers’ issues. We also have an award-winning Customer Happiness Team that proactively listens and acts to assist our customers; they are responsible for curating the best possible ReviewTrackers experience, which can mean anything from running custom reports to providing customers with personalized content like trending best practices, cheat sheets, and downloadable how-to guides.
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What was the biggest challenge you faced while getting your company up and running, and how did you overcome it?
In our early years, the most trying part and biggest challenge was raising capital and finding the means and resources to scale our business.
To overcome this, we became active in pitching ReviewTrackers to investors, as well as in joining programs like gener8tor (Madison, WI), SXSW Interactive Accelerator, and Start-Up Chile. These opportunities helped ReviewTrackers gain visibility not only among our target market and customers, but also among members of the press as well as the investor community.
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Are there resources you have utilized that other founders might find compelling or useful?
As a founder, I love the opportunity to connect with successful technical entrepreneurs and listen to their recommendations for software and tools that help their own teams work better. At ReviewTrackers we make use of various collaboration and productivity apps like Basecamp, Slack, Trello, Google Docs, GoToMeeting, and Box. Recently, we have also turned our attention to tools like Marketo (for marketing automation), ZenDesk (for customer communication), Lever (for recruitment and applicant tracking) and Zapier (for connecting multiple APIs and automating everyday business tasks).
What challenges, if any, are you grappling with?
ReviewTrackers has grown so fast, so one of the challenges we’re currently facing is how to find the right people to hire.
We are based in Chicago, a major market, so there is no shortage of smart, talented, technology-savvy individuals in our community. We place heavy importance on culture fit, because we truly believe that it is pivotal to our continued growth as a company. Also, workplace outcomes can also be affected by whether or not the personality and values of an individual are congruent with that of the organization.
This means that our leadership team, including myself, is always evaluating and refining our hiring and recruitment efforts in response to the challenge of finding talent that will fit with our culture and contribute to our growth as we scale.
What is the most helpful tip or “hack” you have ever learned, stumbled across, or been given?
One very useful piece of advice that I’ve been given is to read a lot about what’s going on in the industry. I understand that there’s a certain temptation in putting off the time to read and learn something new because you’re too busy building a prototype, or raising the next round of capital, or growing your team threefold. It is extremely important to keep your finger on the pulse of what’s happening. It’s one of the best ways to develop your own ability to come up with, and execute, unique ideas that solve real-world problems.
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Is there anything else you would like to share about your company?
Yes. We’re hiring!
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Sandra Sloan
Sandra has previous supply chain and business operations experience which she is leveraging as an author with FundingSage focused on spotlighting entrepreneurs and their startup efforts.
