Demand Satisfaction!

Coming soon! That is simultaneously my most favorite and least favorite phrase of the start-up world.

Nearly everyone engaged in the business of start-ups is working hard, and most of them have a ton of ideas, but they don’t always have the resources they need. If you’re in that world, you’re working on a whole lot of potential, and you’re probably making a whole lot of promises.

When people request a feature and you reply, “That feature is on our roadmap and we should have it ready to go in the near future,” that could very easily come back to bite you in the hindquarters six months later when someone asks the follow-up: “Hey, is this feature ready yet, or what?” That’s what I like to call the “le sigh” moment. You meant to get it done. You wanted to get it done. You just didn’t quite get it done. Yet.

The counterpart to the “le sigh” moment is the “hell yeah” feeling. This is the undeniably awesome moment when you are looking at the new feature on your computer screen right now as you test it out while saying to the world, “Yes! We totally agree with you about this feature you’re asking for. In fact, it’s coming very soon!”

That’s the spot I’m in today. The “hell yeah” place. The one where I can confidently say, “You bet it’s coming soon. And it’s pretty cool.”

Coming soon: Our new set of company tools, which will help company employees connect customers to even more great answers to their many customer-service questions. The first wave of these tools includes “gardening” tools, for cleaning up messy topics; “traffic” tools to help point customers to the most up-to-date information; and “guardian” tools to help mask private customer information like e-mail addresses and phone numbers.

That’s the very short description of what to expect. We’ll be rolling the suite out (yes) very soon. For now, though, we’ve asked a small group of our most active communities on Get Satisfaction to try out the tools for beta testing purposes. You may notice that some company sections of Get Satisfaction look a little different. There’s some new functionality on those pages. You might receive some new messages as you browse around or find that you can dig down a little deeper into the content on those pages. Our hope is that you’ll find the things you’re looking for more easily, and that the company reps will have more ways to help you get the answers you’re looking for.

As always, we welcome your comments and observations during this beta period, and we’ve kicked the beta-ball rolling by starting a new topic about the upcoming company tools. If your company is already participating on Get Satisfaction and you want to be part of the beta, shoot us an e-mail and we’ll try to fit you into the mix: info [at] getsatisfaction [dot] com.