So, there is a large marketplace for designers and online marketers, and competitive bidding for businesses. But, how do you separate the grain from the chaff?
Design Quotes has set out to address this problem, dumping its own “bidding for leads” model.
It has designed a scoring system to rate designers and marketers using elements of gamification. So businesses evaluating a number of professionals will have simple comparisons to make, besides rating their quality of work, in order to make decisions on whom to hire.
Co-founder and director Daniel Duckworth says the company’s new model achieves a perfect balance “of giving clients good deals from the best designers and providing designers with great long-term customers.”
Co-creation and feedback
“We expect our use of gamification to really help us create some great community content. We’ve been using a concept called ‘co-creation’ to develop the new model. Facebook groups are great for this. We get a lot of feedback from our users about how to best run our service,” he said.
Now, when clients post projects, the designers with the highest scores are first recommended, not merely those with the lowest bids.
Duckworth concedes that Design Quotes’ old business model wasn’t providing the best possible service to connect professionals with businesses.
“We were unhappy with the ‘bidding for leads’ model. It worked in some ways, but we found that clients weren’t always happy with the match and designers were paying for projects that didn’t go anywhere,” he said.
Single score
Design Quotes began analysing its services and examined what its industry peers were offering. Duckworth says he found that competitors like ServiceSeeking and Quotify used a bidding model.
“Some services flooded the client with too many quotes while some others simply served up the lead to the first four designers. This isn’t ideal for the designer or the client,” he said.
Consequently, Design Quotes introduced elements of gamification in its new system in order to “provide incentives for designers who want to be recommended to clients first.”
Not unlike sites such as elance, designers and other professionals post a profile and are additionally rated by clients. Professionals can enhance their scores by writing guest posts in the community blog or answering questions in the Q&A forum.
Based, among other things, on client ratings and the amount of content they contribute, the Design Quotes system hands out a score for each professional. This score, among other things, helps potential clients choose the best professionals for their projects.
Design Quotes’ new system is also available as a web app.
