by Carolyn Craven

You know what I hate about car shopping? It’s impossible to just window shop. It’s one of those industries that I feel just hasn’t kept up with customer demand for a less intrusive shopping experience. Sure, you can poke around online for car reviews and look at a dealer inventories on their websites, but it’s still really hard to get good information or even just browse a showroom in person without making best friends with a hard-selling salesperson. Sorry to all the well-meaning car salespeople out there – I know you’re just trying to earn a living like the rest of us. But sometimes I just want to window shop. I want to look at the sticker, sit in the car, play with the radio, check out your inventory, and kick the tires. When I’m window shopping I don’t want to fill out forms, spend half an hour chit-chatting about my kids or my dog, and I certainly don’t want ten follow-up phone calls asking when I’m coming in for a test drive. (I’ve literally gotten ten messages from this one salesperson – I’m taking bets as to how long it will take her to figure out that I actually did come in for a test drive and already told the other rep I’m not interested.)

Other than the auto industry, I can’t think of many more major industries that haven’t given in to the internet-driven customer demand for open information sharing and open window shopping. Consumers have demanded that vendors and community sites freely offer up pricing, product reviews, costing info, feature lists, and many other helpful tidbit of information. And I think it’s fabulous. As a consumer, I’m thrilled that I can educate myself and get the most for my money. And as a business owner in an industry with few barriers to entry and awash in competition, I applaud the free-flow of product and pricing information. Sure, it lets all of us survey software companies keep an eye on what our competition is doing. But more importantly, I think it helps us better serve our customers.

I want my customers to window shop. I invite them to compare Checkbox Survey Software with the other guys – take a free trial and kick our tires. I want them to gather as much information from our website and our free trial as possible and compare us to other survey software. I want them to take our “Which Survey Software is Right for You?” quiz so they have a chance to try out Checkbox for themselves and learn a little more about our product versions. And I want them to be able to do all this without a salesperson breathing down their necks. Of course, our salespeople are always available at any point during the evaluation process if a customer wants to talk or ask questions. But I really believe that it’s important for customers to be able to freely evaluate and compare all the survey software products out there before we give them the hard sales push. Customers who are well-educated and not rushed into a decision are going to be happier with their purchase and more likely to develop productive, long-term relationships with us. And shouldn’t that be the ultimate endgame for us all?