Demand Satisfaction!

How do you encourage companies that are hesitant to participate on Get Satisfaction?

We’ve got a lot of theories on that. I won’t go into all of them, but there are some companies — often larger companies with an entrenched beauracracy, for example — who don’t participate on our site. They may simply not know about us yet, may not understand what we’re up to, or they may have a big wall set up to discourage customers from contacting them. They often seem to have a culture that doesn’t embrace the idea that communicating with customers openly and honestly is the way to go about things. What is the best way to reach that kind of company?

Again, we have a lot of ideas. But it seems immediately clear that the companies that feel compelled to participate do so because their customers want them to. Or, to put it another way: Their customers ask them to join the conversation on Get Satisfaction. So, they do.

Being invited, asked, and encouraged is the flip side of being compelled, shamed, and threatened. It would be ideal if companies received an invitation from sincere Get Satisfaction customers and responded to that request to participate. Wouldn’t it be great if you could send them that kind of message — and then see how they respond?

We’ve been working on the backbone of a system that helps customers invite companies to Get Satisfaction. We’re coming up with some interesting ways to find the people in large organizations who are most open to our ideas behind customer service. That’s the key part, I think. Reaching the right people, as opposed to spamming everyone and hoping the message gets through to someone.

However our system ends up working on the technical side, we’ll need to write the invitation language. We spend a lot of time crafting and framing our language because we believe it’s extremely important. We’re constantly joking and making fun of the really bad examples of language we uncover in customer service correspondence. It’s not too much of a stretch to believe that everyone else does that, too, is it? Everyone hates that faux-formal verbiage, that “your call is important to us” language.

We’ve yet to wet our pen on this invitation language, and we may not have to. We may have already uncovered a template we can borrow. A Get Satisfaction user has created his own excellent call to action for companies.

He posted it in the Target section of Get Satisfaction:

Open Invitation to Target Corporation

I’m writing to inform you that a small group of Target customers have banded together at GetSatisfaction.com, a customer-driven website that aims at directly communicating with businesses and companies. Target is among other great companies like Google, Pandora, YouTube, and more.

As a former Target employee, I think this is a great opportunity for Target to directly work with customers to resolve complaints as well as broadcast news, ideas, and information to interested Target customers.

Please, take a moment to visit about what I and other Target shoppers have to say about YOU.

Nicely done, sir. You’re definitely a Get Satisfaction superstar. You’re reaffirming our beliefs about our goals. And, as a former Target employee, you’re exactly the kind of person we want to reach: informed, helpful, understanding of the importance of customer engagement, and someone with an inside voice on the subject.

Thanks for passing it on to the company. We’ll do our best to amplify your voice — and help others do the same.