RANTING AND RATING

How LikeMoji is giving customers and employees an anonymous way to provide feedback.

Written by Natasha Bourlin

Any business owner has experienced it, feared it — the dreaded social media rant by someone who had a bad experience with their company. More often than not, feverish fingers levy online onslaughts instead of reaching out to the owner or manager directly and letting him or her try and rectify the issue. 

Angered customers complaining in a public forum can adversely affect any organization, whether those claims are justified or not. Small business owners reliant upon returning customers and positive word of mouth usually suffer most. 

This situation inspired the launch of Truckee-based LikeMoji in 2018. 

Anonymous feedback

Co-founder and CEO of LikeMoji Alex Barrett and his two partners, Ben Cooper and Steve Tietze, conceptualized a digital platform that puts customer experience first. LikeMoji is “an app for the non-confrontational sort,” Barrett says. 

From left, Ben Cooper, Alex Barrett, and Steve Tietze, co-founders of LikeMoji in Truckee. Photo by Andrea Laue

Developed to interactively engage employees, clients, or customers, LikeMoji is ideal for human resource directors, educational institutions, membership-based organizations, doctors, restaurants, and nearly any business owner seeking feedback on how they’re doing. 

Managers can quickly create a page using LikeMoji’s industry-specific templates and icons, or they can provide their own graphics and material. They choose from categories such as “atmosphere,” “food quality,” and “service” in which to acquire information from patrons. The app also can be used internally for incognito employee input. 

Customers may feel uncomfortable about speaking to an employee or manager when their visits didn’t meet expectations, and employees may hesitate to let their boss know when they’re having troubles at work. Both groups are able to anonymously give real-time feedback via LikeMoji’s on-site kiosks or through the mobile and web apps. 

Bettering the business

Establishments without the aluminum-encased tablet kiosks in house can share a link to their LikeMoji pages, inviting guests to connect through the apps. Comments are sent to managers without divulging commenters’ identities. The manager and staff members then have an opportunity to address issues immediately. 

“A lot of businesses send out a survey in a couple of days (after a customer’s experience) asking how they did. I think it’s great that businesses want to learn from their customers’ experiences and find out where they can improve, but what we really want to do with LikeMoji is to flip that on its head,” Barrett explains. “Because once you’ve already had your experience, if the business happened to fail you, essentially what they’re doing is now asking you for a favor to tell them how they can be better for the next guy. It’s almost adding insult to injury.”

LikeMoji tallies the valuable data received in an online analytics dashboard, so each business can easily see what it’s doing well and where it could improve. 

A few local business managers, including those at Coffeebar and Tahoe Donner ski resort, already have embraced LikeMoji’s platform to improve their enterprises, and they are seeing positive results.

“Coffeebar currently has LikeMoji kiosks at five of our six locations,” says John Wittig, director of operations for Coffeebar, which has locations in Reno, Squaw Valley, Truckee, Menlo Park, and Redwood City. “We are a hospitality-focused brand committed to the relentless pursuit of improvement, and we place a high value on the feedback we get from our community every day. Privacy can sometimes be a barrier to receiving honest and direct feedback on where we excel or where we have opportunity to improve. For example, guests must have public profiles to use Yelp or Google Reviews. LikeMoji eliminated this barrier, which has allowed us to hear from guests more than ever before. In our opinion, this is essential to us growing as a company and as a community.”

“Tahoe Donner added LikeMoji as our primary anytime feedback tool in June 2018,” explains Lindsay Hogan, Director of Marketing and member relations for Tahoe Donner. “Prior to LikeMoji we had feedback coming in, but it wasn’t organized, with some of it on paper comment cards, and it was really difficult for us to do anything with the feedback. With LikeMoji, the data comes to us in a user-friendly dashboard that is organized, and it’s easy to see issues and trends in the comments. Since then, we’ve had nearly 12,000 customers leave us feedback, and it’s been incredibly valuable. The system allows you to reply to the anonymous comments and turn a negative experience around with a private interaction that doesn’t damage our online reputation.”

“Most businesses want repeat customers; they don’t just want a one-time visit,” Barrett says. “They want to keep customers engaged if they can and show them that they’re valued.” 

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Natasha Bourlin is a freelance writer who’s happy about having a more direct online alternative for giving feedback to business managers.