News About Needle

Want to Turn Your Brand’s Fans Into Expert Advisors? Try This Startup.  Needle connects online shoppers with product experts who assist them through chat, voice and video communication. Imagine the high-quality customer service of a sales person on the shop floor at Nordstrom, but when you’re shopping online.

Needle engineers have spent two years working on the company’s technology, which combines a communications platform with chat and e-commerce tools so that sales clerks can show products as if they were in a store with a labor system that trains and motivates them.

Presenting...a truly mobile startup. Literally! With its mobile contact center, a startup called Needle is showcasing just how easy it is these days for young companies to set up shop just about anywhere. Including in a giant RV.

Needle sews a social-commerce road trip  “We’re leveraging labour in a new way, where work isn’t a place, it’s an activity and it can be wherever you are – when people work when and where they want, their output and quality of work is much higher.

Mobile Customer Care Mania: Needle  Needle is designed to get expert user advice when you want to buy something--from people who actually use the product, not typical contact center agents.

Where Should I Park My Startup?  …now doing business from a Mobile Contact Center: a huge, colorfully painted RV parked—for now— on a street in San Francisco, with several employees working inside.

“When you shop for things online… you want to consider the purchase,” Lynch said. “Having a human ask you how you’re using it, if you’re new to the experience, what’s the temperature of the water, is like a knowledgeable sales clerk for in-store shopping, but we’re taking it up a notch.”

The impressive RV provides a workspace for employees and serves as a travelling billboard for the company, which connects retail partners like Urban Outfitters, Skullcandy and Under Armor with product experts who chat to consumers.

Potential Needlers are screened for their ability to communicate and receive remote training. They are sent select products to test and they can also earn points to redeem against products.

Salt Lake business gives new meaning to going to work.  "We want to bring you the people that actually own those products and services, because we as consumers want to talk to somebody that owns it," Lynch said, "not somebody who's sitting in a contact center who's just been trained on some items. We want to talk to the people who use it every day."

Skullcandy hands over live chat to skateboarders and surfers.  Barlow says the service gives its customers a chance to have their questions answered by like-minded agents, who can discuss not only the brands they like, but how they perform.

Chat services firm puts passionate brand advocates to work to create an engaging online experience.  If your company produces a quality product or service, then your customer base likely already includes a segment of brand advocates—those customers who love your products, are repeat purchasers and who enthusiastically pass along positive word-of-mouth to family, friends, coworkers and on social networks.

Why outsource to India when you can tap your biggest fans to handle customer service? Skullcandy, the maker of high-end headphones, has pulled people from its core demographic of snowboarders, skateboarders, and surfers to help customers on its website via online chat.

Is Fan Sourcing the Future of Customer Service?  If you sell online and want to delight your customers, increase conversion rates and lower your costs, don't turn shoppers over to an anonymous customer-service operator when they want more information about your products.  Try fan sourcing.

Forget Customer Service Try Fan Sourcing.  Fan sourcing is all about connecting consumers with fans who are knowledgeable and passionate about the products online shoppers are interested in.

Utah company brings in-store shopping experience to the internet. Needle works with companies to ensure online shoppers have salespeople who are experts and fans of certain products and stores available to help customers in their purchasing decisions.

Customer Testimonials on Steroids. The premise for this new Needle tool/service is so simple and brilliant…it’s integrating the voices of brand fans (your customers) on your website to explain (and sell) the products/services you offer.

Using gamification in your call centre. Regardless of whether or not you like video games, you must acknowledge their role in shaping the behaviours of the new generation of workers. To ignore their effect will be detrimental to your business.

A fan-sourced customer service and sales platform. As brands become larger, they often find that making a personal connection with their audience becomes more of a challenge. Hoping to help remedy this, Utah-based Needle connects a brand’s biggest fans with customers seeking product advice, enabling a personal dialogue via text, video or voice chats.

US based Needle - an online platform that enables companies to identify product experts who can deliver powerful, one-on-one product recommendations on a brand’s behalf, earning rewards for discussing products they already love.

The platform provides a rich chat toolset for agents to assist online shoppers to make a purchase decision including the ability to interactively demonstrate features of products, cross-sell and up-sell with an outfit builder and cart builder, and create social coupons to share with friends via Facebook.

Needle sales chat gets big name retailer, looks for new funding (exclusive) Online shopping has become a staple of our consumer life. Sites like Amazon and eBay reported positive third quarter financial earnings, with Amazon reaching 51 percent net sales over last year. But with all this available product eyeing our wallets, Needle is betting there is need for clarity in whether a brand is right for you.

Utah company Needle taps the power of ‘fan sourcing’ The idea he now calls “fan sourcing” came to Morgan Lynch about two years ago when he was searching for a wet suit to use in a triathlon challenge.

Needle Threads Customers Into Personal Interactions in New, Social Chat Service: We've all got products we're passionate about - Apple, Microsoft, Google, Twitter, Facebook, you name it. Companies can set up their own "Pincushion" channels through Needle. By doing so their customers can sign up to help sell their products using the Needle chat platform.

Interview with Morgan Lynch, Needle: Lynch told us all about what Needle is up to, how the site grew out of his search for a wetsuit, and how he's applying the same models developed at LogoWorks into a new market.

Leveraging Product Evangelists as a Virtual Salesforce: "Crowdsourcing is a hot topic these days. Logoworks, which was started in 2001, pioneered crowdsourcing... Morgan Lynch, who founded Logoworks, put the power of crowdsourcing, or as he prefers to call it, "distributed workforces," to the test. His new company Needle uses a distributed workforce to create a better shopping experience for ecommerce sites."