I had a chance to run few experiments with Uservoice (http://www.uservoice.com) and KISSinsights ( http://www.kissinsights.com/signup/bjfgaid). Let me share the results with you.
Well, to start with, what is KISSinsights? To quote the founders:
And Uservoice is sorta different thing (what you can't probably say from its tagline):
KISSinsights makes it ridiculously easy for you to ask questions and for your customers to answer them. [...] The surveys look pretty sweet, too.
Basically, that's it. Nothing new, but the fact that KISSinsights was brought by the same team as KISSmetrics, which are quite known, gives them few extra points (or maybe not).
And Uservoice is sorta different thing (what you can't probably say from its tagline):
Your customers have great ideas. Are you ready to listen?
Typically, from the first sight, they should not be compared directly. Uservoice is there for building communities, heating up discussions, cultivating ideas growth and soliciting (some) customer feedback. KISSinsights is also can be good with ideas solicitation, and, basically, that's it.
However, I still found it reasonable to compare them.
Few words about the setup. I've run Uservoice for about a month on the majority pages of the site. KISSinsights was installed on only one of the most visiting pages, appears only after 10 secs, asks only one question and doesn't show up (I believe!) for those who have already participated in it. Oh, and one more thing, I'll be talking about free versions of both products.
Now, the results:
- Uservoice has generated some amount of feedback within the first several days of being installed. I believe this has something to do with early adopters, who can visiting the site often and reacting quickly to the changes occuired. It started low, peaked on the next day or two, and then went down to nothing quickly after that. KISSinsights was installed for just a few days, and started to generate feedback right away. It started low, and than went gradually up on amount of feedback solicited. As for now, after running for just a week (comparing to 5 weeks of Uservoice), KISSinsights has solicited three times more feedback than Uservoice.
- No on was every bothered by Uservoice button (or did, but decided to stay quite on that). However, we've received some amount of complaints for "annoying box" quickly after installing KISSinsights. Frankly speaking, I still think this is good, because it's better be loved or hated, than be in the middle.
- KISSinsights quality of feedback is much better, although my original impression was that Uservoice tends to make your visitors leave much more detailed feedback.
- There is no way to follow up with visitors through the KISSinsights directly. I don't know if this is good or bad, but you should sacrifice with something. Otherwise, torturing visitors with email/registration forms, might drive the real value away - ideas and suggestions how to improve the product. But Uservoice provides a decent mechanism to follow up with visitors.
- KISSinsights allows to pass some information along aside with answers to survey. Uservoice is quite limited on that.
- I didn't observe any increase in bounce rate after installing either KISSinsights and Uservoice, but I found the average time spent on the page higher by 20% after installing KISSinsights.
In conclusion (which I'm hesitating to make, as I've just started experimenting with these products), I do see that "intruding" way of KISSinsights works better, even if it irritates some of the visitors. And, generally, I am strongly believer that it's better to have emotions on the site, than the flat, emotion-less interest.
I'm going to give both of them a longer run, and review them again.
