Demand Satisfaction!

Businesses benefit when they allow their customers to speak their mind publicly, and respond in kind.

That’s a core belief of ours here at Get Satisfaction. And with more and more companies adopting Get Satisfaction as the basis for their customer community, we’re increasingly sensitive to some of the challenges of maintaining this “everybody wins” dynamic. We’re 100% committed to providing a neutral and transparent space for companies and customers to interact, but we believe there are all kinds of tools that will allow companies to be more effective participants *and* create killer business value for them. We also know there is a lot more we can do to help cultivate ongoing community around products, services and brands. So in the coming weeks we’ll be rolling out a range of features that will make Get Satisfaction an even more irresistible tool for companies to collaborate with their customers.

In the interest of transparency, here’s a sampling from the short-term product roadmap:

• Better search/posting process: last week we released a better way for people to search Get Satisfaction and post new topics. The new design is helping people find answers quickly (reducing redundant issues), and dramatically improving the quality of new topics. We welcome your feedback for how we can continue to improve this.
• “Deputies”: This upcoming feature allows companies to assign special powers to their most active users, rewarding them with status and enabling them with tools to cultivate the community
• Problem Status: We’re making it easier to get to desired outcomes! In addition to improving the design of Official Replies and the “People’s Pick” replies, we’re rolling out a Status display for problems. Companies will be able to mark problems with their current status, such as “known issue” or “solved”. This will allow us to show issues and their status to users even before they search or add duplicate information.
• Featured company topics: The new Company main page on GSFN will promote more general community engagement, beyond just customer service. For example, we will highlight the most recent announcements and questions from the company to its users.
• Showing related topics: By adding suggested topic links for the company on each topic page we’ll help users better find answers to their questions, and stumble upon interesting content.
• Merge topics: In the event that people add topics that duplicate existing ones, we’ll allow users to map them to the original topic. With tools like this we’re going to make it easier and easier to do community gardening.
• Deprecate topics: When a company releases a new version of its product, topics for the old version are often no longer very relevant. The deprecate topic feature will allow companies to minimize the visibility of old/outdated topics in search results and topic lists
• OpenID: One of our most requested features from companies that want to avoid making their users create another account is Open ID support, which will be coming soon. Note: we’ve already added OAuth support, which allows for even more seamless account pass-through.
• Analytics: A little further out (but relatively soon), we’ll be offering a dashboard view based around the analytics we’re collecting on a company and its community. This will make it a lot easier to manage team participation, community health and content trends.

On top of this, we’re currently testing an open API that will allow companies (and anyone else) to customize Get Satisfaction in virtually any way imaginable. If you’re interested in pre-beta access, please contact info@getsatisfaction.com.

If you’re an existing or potential business user of Get Satisfaction, let us know if there are features that you’d love to see.