Sneak Peek: The Future of Boast

Boast was originally designed to do one thing really well – collect a video testimonial.

Over the last couple of years we have added some basic improvements to do minor customizations to forms and make it a little easier to use the platform itself to request testimonials from your customers; but they’ve all been pretty small changes. Even with a modest focus, Boast has continued to grow and has been used by top universities, Fortune 500 companies, and by organizations and individuals we admire from around the world.

We realized it was time to make some big changes to the product and we revisited every single feature, want, and need that has been requested over the years to put the product on a trajectory to help hundreds of thousands more people collect and share customer stories.

Here’s what’s coming:

New Features on the Horizon

Click a link below to jump down to a description of each upcoming feature.

• Custom Form Builder
• Customer Sentiment
• Enhanced Notifications
• Advanced Landing Pages
• Enhanced Compliance
• Locations & Users
• Improved Response Management
• Contacts
• Sequences
• Other Cool Features

Want Early Access?

If you want to learn more or get early access to the latest and greatest Boast features, sign up for our On-Demand Webinar: The Future of Boast.

Boast Co-Founder and CEO, Ryan Doom, and Director of Customer Success, Matt Hall, walk through a demo of the new Boast features along with instructions for how to get early access to the new features.

Watch the Webinar Replay Now

Custom Form Builder

You are no longer limited to just a title, feedback box, a star rating and a single video. We’ve added additional fields to our entry level plans and pretty much any field you could imagine to our more advanced plans.

Standard fields that you can use:

• Name fields
• Email
• Mobile phone
• Feedback
• Rating
  • 5 stars ratings (default)
  • 1 – 10
  • Smileys
  • Thumbs up / down
  • Net Promoter Score
  • CES (1 – 7)
  • CSAT (1 – 7)
• Company
• Job Title
• Location – collect feedback for various business locations
• User – collect feedback for different staff / employees
• Video – new and improved video collection field
• Photo
• Consent – setup positive consent checkboxes
• Text – include additional informational text on your form

Advanced form fields:

• Text input – ask additional single line questions
• Long text – good for asking a question with longer open responses
• Number – asking something that needs to be validated as a number
• Multiple-choice – ask questions with your own multiple choice options
• Checkboxes – allow them to check one or more answer to a question
• Dropdown – select from a list of options
• Date – ability to select a date on a nice calendar picker widget
• Hidden – sometimes you want to include your own information in a form to be submitted. Developers know what I’m talking about, this is for you. Psst you can fill data into this field from the URL. You’re welcome.
• Additional Video – Wow. You can now add more than one video to your forms! If you want to break your form up into multiple questions each with a short 20 – 30 second answer and have a distinct video for each of those – go for it.
• Additional Photos – Maybe you’re collecting a testimonial after a project and want them to send in some finished photos, who knows – but you can now do it.
• Additional ratings – You can add more than one rating to a form now and you are not limited to just the star ratings.

Other exciting form features:

• Conditional fields based on sentiment – You can hide or show fields based on how someone has rated you. It’s now possible to only ask for video from your biggest fans.
• Multiple-page forms – If you want to break your form up and only collect a few questions per page, you can now add more pages to your form and it will walk the user through each page.
• Enhanced thank you messages – Thank you messages are also customizable by sentiment and have some exciting new features.
• Form sharing – Embedding a form directly into your site is still extremely easy and will work better than ever.

Customer Sentiment

The future of Boast is more than just a way to collect a customer story one time. You’ll be able to use Boast during your entire relationship with your customer. We now have the ability to track and monitor customer happiness with you and your business. This is referenced and tracked throughout the system and connected to each contact as customer sentiment. Each of the primary rating types (stars, thumbs, smileys, NPS, etc) is broken down into 1 of 3 customer sentiments. The customer is either a Promoter, Passive, or Detractor. Throughout Boast, there are areas where you can filter or perform activities based on customer sentiment. One key area is actually on the form builder. If you have a rating field on page 1 of your form you, can then optionally show the video field only to Promoters. You can then ask a different set of questions on how you can improve your service to Detractors or work to salvage that relationship.

Enhanced Notifications

In Boast Classic, your entire team receives emails of any new submissions and the customer does not receive any confirmation that they have submitted their form. We’ve made changes to Boast that give you the ability to send an immediate notification to the submitter thanking them for their submission. This supports dynamic variables to automatically personalize the message.

You can also customize who within your organization receives emails when a specific form is submitted.

Advanced Landing Pages

Most people use Boast by embedding the form directly on their own website. However, we know a lot of people just want to be able to easily email out a link to collect testimonials. Our landing page designer makes it super easy for you to add your own logo, colors, and customize it to your needs to make collecting testimonials even easier.

Enhanced Compliance

We’ve added additional features to make it even easier for you to comply with GDPR, CCPA and growing privacy regulations. This includes the ability to add very specific positive consent fields to your forms. Boast provides you with broad terms of service agreement you can use by default for your customers’ submission. It’s important that you read it and abide by the terms as well. Essentially, don’t collect information, sell it, and be a jerk with it, okay? Boast is designed for professionals collecting feedback from customers and people they have existing relationships with – don’t use it for any nefarious purposes. If you wish to add additional consent fields with your own terms that is now available on some of our new plans.

Locations & Users

If you have one or more physical location where people actually come to your office and interact with your team – this feature is for you. You can now configure business locations within Boast. Using locations, you can default forms to collect feedback for a specific location and then filter and show responses based on that location. As a manager you’ll be able to track customer sentiment across locations and manage customer happiness.

You’ll also be able to leverage the “Review Links” for each location. This gives you the ability to link to your Google Review collection page, Facebook Reviews, Yelp, etc. Now you can ask for a video testimonial, and then follow up and ask for different types of reviews per location as well.

Users are your own human staff that work at locations. You are now able to collect reviews for a specific location and a specific employee (user). This is great for real estate agents and any business with customers that have a one on one relationship with an employee at that company. Now you can see who is and who isn’t crushing it.

Improved Response Management

Responses now track additional information. You can automatically or manually associate responses to users, locations, and add tags. You’ll still be able to select a thumbnail to show and download the videos to your computer.

Contacts

Boast Classic tracked contact information, but there wasn’t a concept of a “Contact.” We now have the ability to track email, phone, and contact information and associate that with 1 or more responses and an overall customer sentiment. Contacts will be automatically created from a form submission or can be bulk imported or added manually by your staff. Contacts can be associated with a location, a user/staff member, even time zones so they don’t get an automated email or SMS at 4am.

Sequences

Boast Classic had a simple feature to send out a one off request to a customer. It’s very simple and can only be done one at a time. We’ve completely reimagined what this feature needed to be for our current and future customers. Boast now has Sequences – which are a series of automated messages that are sent out. Contacts can be enrolled automatically from a form they submitted, added one at a time, or added from a complete contact CSV import.

A sequence increases your rate of response for customer story requests. After you’ve performed a job or completed a task with a customer you can enroll them in a sequence. They can then receive a series of messages that ask them for different types of feedback and other social reviews. We’re shipping with email notices first and SMS will soon be following.

Other cool features

• Pre-fill forms from URL variables.
• Zapier support will take over for most of our current integration for now.
• Auto apply tags to contacts and responses and use these as filtering options.
• Invite Boast users from other organizations to help manage your account.
• Connect your account to multiple different organizations using Boast.

How can you get access to upcoming Boast features?

If you want early access to the latest and greatest Boast features, watch our On-Demand Webinar: The Future of Boast. Boast Co-Founder and CEO, Ryan Doom, and Director of Customer Success, Matt Hall, present a demo of the new Boast features along with instructions for how to get early access to the new features. Watch Now

When the new Boast features are ready and available for your account, you’ll be notified via email. Your account will not automatically be upgraded to the new version of Boast. There are a lot of changes with this version, and you’ll need to update your embedded widgets and embedded forms after you upgrade. We’ll make it possible so you can choose when you upgrade your account to ensure you have time to make any necessary changes to your website or email links.

Features from the current Boast that will not be in Boast Next:

• Direct YouTube integration (Enabled via Zapier now)
• Direct Mailchimp integration (Enabled via Zapier now)
• JSON API feed is changing significantly

That’s not all – we’ve got even more coming after this release!

• SMS text messages within Sequences
• Simple inline video trimming / editing
• Updated dashboard and reporting
• Improved API and additional integrations
• Gift cards, rewards, and other incentives

Thoughts, questions or feedback? We’d love to hear it! Use the chat icon in the bottom right corner of the page to get in touch.

Posted in: Product Updates