Jason Fried
37 Signals, Inc.
Chicago, IL
Dear Jason,
I want to first thank you for taking the time to write up a detailed post about your issues with our service. In some ways it was the model of good feedback: specific, direct, actionable. The only thing missing was your browser and OS details :)
You were angry, and honestly I don’t blame you. We all know what it’s like to feel manipulated. And while I would have preferred you sending us a note, or even posting it somewhere less trafficked than your popular blog, the fact is that Get Satisfaction is a huge proponent of public airing of grievances. You were right to bring it to our attention any way you saw fit. I only wish that you hadn’t implied unethical motives with words like “extortion,” “mafia shakedown,” etc. The fact is, many people hear those words and nothing else, and it compromises years of work by our small but committed team.
But what I really wanted to do, from one product guy to another, is explain how we found ourselves here and where we’re going. I hope it gives you some idea of the kind of people we are, and the vision that drives us. Much of that story was overwhelmed yesterday by one big screwup and the unintended consequences of some well-intentioned design decisions. There are lessons here!
We started Get Satisfaction originally to solve a problem we had ourselves. We’d experienced the pain of delivering customer service via email, but had amazing experiences answering questions in public on our blog. We thought we could build something more results-oriented and social than what was available. Get Satisfaction was born.
After starting it, we noticed that everyone we talked to was frustrated with customer service with big companies. We hypothesized that the companies that needed open, honest customer interaction the most were those that were least likely to embrace it in a programmatic way. So we launched Get Satisfaction not only for companies to set up their own customer communities, but also to let customers start a community space around any brand they liked–to give them the same kind of soap box for results that you have with your blog, Signal vs Noise.
We believed that the more we empowered customers the better off companies would be, whether or not they knew it yet. It was a provocative concept, and we certainly owe much of our success so far on creating this as a “Switzerland for customer service.” For instance, this just popped into my Twitter search feed:
denisess: Get Satisfaction actually works. I’ve been trying to get McAfee support to respond to me for 6 weeks. 24 hours on GS and I got a response.
Because we wanted to make sure we created an even playing field between employees and customers we devised the Company-Customer Pact to foster accountability for both sides. Our values have always been the driving force behind our product design. We benefited from good SEO on these support related pages, of course, but we always tried to be clear that this was a third-party site. Thus the heavy branding on our old header:
In the year and half since we launched we’ve seen the numbers of companies added on a monthly basis skyrocket–but today over 80% of new companies are added by the companies themselves, and these range from huge companies to little tiny ones. It was on the basis of this (and requests by these companies) that we decided to redesign the header and overall framing of the site. We wanted to make it simpler and more neutral for companies to use how they saw fit, whether as a primary support channel or remote outpost. There were branding hierarchy issues between our logo and the name of the company (as you can see above). Due to the minimized branding, we created the Company-Customer Pact badge for companies that signed up to partcipate.
We realized we needed something in this spot for the communities where the company was not participating. This is when the very badly worded badge was added. Released two weeks ago, it was thrown together in the midst of the overall redesign effort and did not get vetted properly. We’ve already seen the consequences. It was most definitely not the result of a strategy to extort.
In thinking about this all day, it occurred to me that the badge was only half the problem. The other half is that the new header design makes confusion more likely when a company is not participating. We solved one problem (confusion for customers on official support sites) and exacerbated another (confusion on unofficial sites).
The other thing is that we currently treat fortune 500 companies the same as little startups, when the situations are very different. It’s important to us that customers who are stymied by AT&T’s phone support be able to use the internet to gain real leverage. But small companies may actually be at a disadvantage relative to the hyper-empowered power users on the Web today. We have to figure out how to deal with that conflict.
Which brings me to the question of where do we go from here? First, we’re in the midst of an ongoing redesign of key components of our system. We’re folding in our learning from the past few years to make for a much clearer, cleaner experience. We’re going to address the core areas of tension that I described in the paragraphs above. We heard a number of great suggestions today in the peanut gallery, including:
- Much more clearly mark areas that are purely user driven
– Put more limits on logo publishing
– Change page titles and descriptions to be clear in search results when pages are not sanctioned support spaces
– More/better tools for setting expectations of a company’s usage of get satisfaction.
These are some of the ideas we’re looking at doing in the very short term, and we’re open to more. We are moving with urgency to make the right revisions.
Our business isn’t about building a better mousetrap, but about fostering new modes of interaction between companies and customers. We don’t always get it right, but we’re proud of the good we’ve done so far. I believe we’ll continue to make progress thanks to honest feedback like yours, and the support of an amazing community.
Sincerely yours,
Thor Muller
CTO & Co-founder
Get Satisfaction
P.S. I hope you also get the chance to read Garrett Dimon’s “can’t we all just get along” post: http://garrettdimon.com/archives/2009/3/31/handling_things/ Eloquent, as always.
Edited @ 3:43 4/1/09. “Inethical” is not a word (as a few nice people pointed out), but “unethical” is. Fixed.
Thor – very well handled. Best of luck.
I was so impressed with the live Q& A response today. GS showed that they walk the walk. Kudos to your whole team!
I was going to write a comment but instead I ended up making it a blog post, and then I lost all my steam so here’s the post:
As an “Employee” for Mozilla for over a year (I’m not actually under their employ), this 37 signals thing makes several very valid points. For example, what if the Microsoft Xbox team did support under the Microsoft Xbox name, and someone complained that they didn’t have a product for Microsoft Word and weren’t answering their questions for Microsoft Word?
People (mainly this one guy who loves sunbird) keep complaining that Sunbird isn’t listed as a product, and he honestly believes that since it’s not listed as a product nobody’s asking questions about it (believe me, we will get questions about a product regardless if there’s a checkbox for it or not) that it’s being ‘dropped’ in favor of development on lightning.
The problem is, Sunbird isn’t a Mozilla Corporation product. It’s not really a Mozilla Foundation product either. It’s just a side effect of the Lightning project. There’s no official support, because it’s not official. However, there’s no way to list some products, but make it when you click on them you’re taken to the proper location for help. For example, there are some very helpful people on the Weave forums under Mozilla Labs, but people decide that they want to post Weave questions here instead. None of the Labs Loons (as I’ll call them for now) want to leave their Lair (hey!) and help here too, because it’s too much hassle. Likewise, 37 signals made a great point:
“At the very least they should allow companies with existing support infrastructure to claim their Get Satisfaction page and automatically and instantly redirect customers over to the official support site.”
This is a great thing, and one of the first things that should be done when a new company is added. When I add a company (which is rare), I get the privilege of finding all the appropriate links, like the official page, contact page, FAQ page, and anything else relevant. I gladly do so! I know not all companies have the resources to help here as well, so I want people who find the page here to be able to get help REGARDLESS!
Here’s an idea for Get Satisfaction: highlight those links on the bottom! Why are they on the bottom, where no one will find them? If a company hasn’t claimed their page, the links to the FAQ and Contact page should be FRONT AND CENTER! This has an added bonus, you can instruct their customers on Get Satisfaction to ENCOURAGE the company to claim their page. Woo hoo!
Not to mention the large disconnect between the GSFN widget and the company page. If you don’t regularly go to company sites looking for the Get Satisfaction widget, you may not have noticed that customers on those external pages can write PRIVATE support e-mails! That’s right, Get Satisfaction isn’t always 100% open. And what’s wrong with that? There’s a lot of discussion about “private get satisfaction“, and I’d seen someone with a law firm mention the need as well to have secret posts. However, it’s pretty odd that you can only access this from within the widget.
Also, duping threads shouldn’t cost money.
Very well said, sir. I’m sorry about the ad hominem attacks you have had to put up with. Good luck at ignite, I’ll be rooting for you.
Is this an April fools joke?
Nice one guys, you really pulled that one off.
Ha ha ha, ha ha ha ha ha! LOL. So funny.
I think many people have failed to grasp the concept of GetSatisfaction and the 37 Signals post hasn’t helped.
It’s up to companies whether they choose to participate via GS but GS is a good place for customers to talk to each other regardless of whether the company participates or not.
Keep up the good work, and don’t be bullied by the people who consider themselves rock stars…
“one product guy to another” on a public blog post?
Very well handled. I have a much higher opinion of your service after seeing what you’ve done and how GS has handled itself in the last 24 hours.
Well said, well handled. You guys are awesome
Nice counter-post but I don’t buy your explanation that the badge was thrown together .. don’t you have anyone that can write a single sentence disclaimer?
“This site is not offically endorsed by $company”
or to be less verbose
“This site is not associated with $company in any way.”
and leave off the [potential libellous] claim that $company doesn’t do any support.
You’ve changed it now I see, wasn’t that hard then.
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Well done! Must have taken a lot of restraint to limit yourself to only say this much about what 37 has really done (or attempted to do): “it compromises years of work by our small but committed team.”
You look better than ever – they are not.
I had never heard of GS before the (web) events of yesterday. I must say that I came away impressed by the way you guys handled the situation. Your attitude and response has gained you one well wisher. Good Luck!
Thor,
I don’t think “inethical” is a word…
Here is something I pulled down from your site, in the section under “how it works” which can be found here
http://getsatisfaction.com/home/customers
–
Let the company know what your question, idea, problem or praise is.
Timely responses come from other employees and other customers, you’ll even get an email alert.
–
And a statement from your post
.. but we always tried to be clear that this was a third-party site.
I am not certain that what you have on the website and what you say here are in agreement.
I can see why you would not want to be explicit about your relationship with companies for who products you provide customers a forum to discuss, it is just not a sufficiently viable business model.
About a year back I read the cluetrain manifesto, which speaks about market places and the internet. Your website and service is what is described in a book, except without the transparency that is needed for a successful market place
There are obviously flaws with both sides of this argument, and one – in particular – has used quite extreme language to get its point across, whether that language is accurate or not. However, I think that the most controversial aspect of GS (bar that unbelievable wording that, thankfully, has been changed) is the use of each company’s logo. A logo is, in effect, a badge of authenticity, one that really does imply ‘this is official’. Not even google displays logos alongside company websites, so I see no reason for GS to do so, for companies that haven’t opted in.
Just what IS your justification for using, without their approval, companies’ logos?
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I’m fairly sure that Fried’s ego is so cunting huge that that open letter will just orbit him for years without ever reaching him. At least you tried.
I need to have an account in order get help from a company on GS. Need I not? And it drives me nuttzzz
I’m a Mozilla employee too, and while I’m not very involved with Mozilla’s SUMO effort (support.mozilla.com), I do feel that I can very clearly see both sides of the argument and I don’t feel there is a clearly “right” side.
When a company is commited to nurturing their community and they dedicate a large amount of time and resources to building a support solution, it can be painful to see users clustering together for support on an external site. In the case of GetSatisfaction, the company can go in and customize with links to their own site, but that won’t prevent users from continuing to ask questions and make complaints in th e external site. When there are enough people doing so, the company has a tough choice to make. Do they spread their resources thinner and redirect either employees or volunteers to provide support at the external site, or do they let the questions either build up, or potentially be answered with less than optimal answers and let the page (which now has even more links and trappings to make it appear more official) become a bit of an ‘eye-sore’ in terms of customer service?
The flip side is of course, the companies that are absolutely not committed to open and user-empowering support solutions. Giving these companies the ability to stifle open airing of grievances and the chance for users to get answers that may not be exactly what the company wants them to hear is a real disservice to the users and I do believe that this is exactly what GetSatisfaction is trying to prevent.
So is there a middle line? I feel there must be one, and I am hopeful that GetSatisfaction will be able to find it soon.
Good luck guys,
-Daniel
2 questions:
- Do you notify companies when you add them to this forum
- When you do, is there an easy to use (1-click) opt out button ?
If not, we all know what this is about.
-Roger
I am a big fan of GetSatisfaction.
But as a business owner, I think GetSatisfaction should definitely allow a company to either participate (use logos, etc) or opt-out (no logos). The logo and trademark of a company have value. GetSatisfaction will dilute that value by using these without permission.
Get Satisfaction’s tactics _are_ blackmail. Cut and dried. Very simple.
“today over 80% of new companies are added by the companies themselves”
That’s probably because the ones we really hate had already been added by the angry mob, and the new bunch is simply companies trying to appear cool and responsive for $0.
On the front page: “Companies that know how to satisfy” lists “Adobe” as one of the three. Yet the Adobe pages are full of “questions” like “WORST CUSTOMER SERVICE EVER!!!”. They only signed up for GS — they’re still not satisfying anybody. They already had their own support forums (which happen to be easier to use than GS). Is there any way in which further fragmenting their feedback channels is good for anybody?
I notice there’s no mention at all of Jason’s proposed pact. Not that anybody expected there to be any response to that, but it’s still telling.
@Ken: I did respond to his pact-framed requests in the comments section of his post. We either already have the features he requested, or made changes to support the requests yesterday. We’ll also be doing more, as I’ve indicated.
Generally speaking, we’ve found that people either believe that all support is better provided through traditional/official channels (what you’re implying), and those that believe that social media are creating opportunities for more collaborative approaches. We fall into the latter camp, and are trying to innovate a new kind of platform with this in mind. Because this is a new category, we’re going to make mistakes, but our motives are all about empowering customers and companies.
I want to highlight something Daniel said:
“The flip side is of course, the companies that are absolutely not committed to open and user-empowering support solutions. Giving these companies the ability to stifle open airing of grievances and the chance for users to get answers that may not be exactly what the company wants them to hear is a real disservice to the users and I do believe that this is exactly what GetSatisfaction is trying to prevent.”
I think this is part of the reason something like Get Satisfaction should exist. Second, there are many companies who, despite their best efforts, do not provide good and timely customer support. Giving the community ways to route around these problems is valuable.
That said, I think Get Satisfaction went to far in the recent re-design, moving too far towards company brands and away from the Get Satisfaction brand. I know that this great for companies that use GS as an official support channel, but it’s very confusing for those that don’t.
Allowing companies to provide links to official support forums is a good idea, but the presentation of these links needs to much more prominent.
Another very good point from Daniel:
“So is there a middle line? I feel there must be one, and I am hopeful that GetSatisfaction will be able to find it soon.”
Good luck to GS, I think the service you provide is very valuable, and I hope this results in a better product. I’m sorry it had to be so painful for you guys.
I was really irritated with your company after I read Jason’s article. The facts were all there and they did not look good. However, after reading your open letter and your responses on Jason’s blog, I have changed my mind. You could have easily been negative and made this whole thing nasty. Instead, you showed real class and, more importantly, humility. Both are rare qualities. I hope you continue to develop these qualities and hold your company to these standards as you grow. I really hope you do this because my company would like to grow with you. After witnessing your behavior over the last two days, I’m convinced that we can benefit from both your service and your character. Over the next few months we’ll be looking for ways to integrate your service into our model. We run many state schools and let me tell you- character counts. Good job!
I mostly agree with Jason’s complaints with your tactics, but I’ll refrain from criticizing your “protection” further.
For companies that don’t use your service as their primary support outlet you should AT LEAST LINK TO THEIR OFFICIAL SUPPORT PAGE if they have one. Otherwise you mislead customers into thinking that you pseudo-support forum is the proper place to “get satisfaction” for real, when its not.
@Milo: I don’t think we have any disagreement. Here’s the thing–we don’t generally add companies. They are added by the companies themselves (80%+) or by customers. On the “add company” page we encourage people to add support page links, blog links, any links that make sense. If those links to do not exist on our company pages it’s because people didn’t add them, not us.
We’re going to do more on our end to clarify what a company’s involvement with us is. We don’t want any confusion!
So, you are upset that Jason publicly portrayed your company as something that is wasn’t? I can understand why that would be upsetting. What’s interesting, is that you guys make a living out of doing that exact same thing. Nice double standard.
Roger said it best…
2 questions:
- Do you notify companies when you add them to this forum
- When you do, is there an easy to use (1-click) opt out button ?
Let companies choose to remove themselves completely from your site. In fact, you shouldn’t even add companies until you’ve gotten permission from them.
@Tuft: I thought I was clear at the top that I was fully supportive of public airing of grievances. No double standard as far as I can tell.
As for Roger’s questions:
Q. Do you notify companies when you add them to this forum?
A. For the 10-20% of companies that are added by customers (rather than the 80-90% that are added by companies themselves) we try to reach out. Unfortunately, the reason these particular companies often get added is that there either a.) is no clear way to contact the company (e.g. most web companies), or b.) the company doesn’t respond because of byzantine phone trees or email black holes (e.g. big telecom companies). When do reach out we have no way of knowing if we’ve reached someone with the power to do anything about it.
Q. Is there a 1-click opt-out button
A. By default companies are opted out, in that we make it clear that “no one from the company has sponsored, endorsed or is participating in this conversation.” But there have been some very good suggestions about how to give companies easy ways to set their level of engagement (from “none” to “official”), and we’re considering the best way to create something that works well.
Thanks for your suggestions. Please understand that while we want to make this more useful and appropriate for companies, we also don’t want to censor users who want to provide each other help around brands or products, even when companies are not involved.
The 80%+ companies that sign themselves up is not the issue here. I think your service is a great idea actually.
But I think you’ve treaded into a moral grey area by adding companies without their knowledge and without doing some due diligence to find their official support channels and linking to them, however arcane they may be.
I also understand that having an unofficial, unsanctioned support forum for an uninterested company can still benefit customers. But again, without an obvious link to official support, you are doing a disservice to both the customers and the company. If absolutely no official support exists, state so. Its better for everyone.
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Congratulations to both for making this a little better and agreeing — but I have to say, a proper response should have started by something more like: “OMFG: we blew that one. Big Time.†You do not need a verbose post to recognize that from 37 Signal, and many others, what you do is deeply flawed. You do not need so many words to say: “If your company handles issues on a public forum, give us the URLs at diy@getsatisfacton.comâ€
I love long answers to complex questions, but this is not complex: you were very wrong. Period.
I was inspired by this hilarious incident to write about the disruptive nature of the web:
http://resourceorientedarchitecture.blogspot.com/2009/03/web-continues-to-be-disruptive.html
In a nutshell, GS is the winner, 37signals the loser simply on account of the fact that GS embraces the web while 37signals is a software vendor wannabe (a la Microsoft). Ergo, 37signals is a dinosaur headed toward extinction.
Moral of the story: let the community enjoy the free end-to-end communication that the web offers. Vendors should continue shitting bricks.
Thanks for using Hanlon’s razor. ;)
s/razor/rule-of-thumb
Thor? You need to close your EM tags, specifically where you mentioned your editing of this post. Everything has been emphasized which, of course, emphasizes nothing.
Tough couple of days very well handled by Thor, Eric and the GS team. Thanks for showing us how it’s done. We all unintentionally make goofs that others get enraged by. Seriously impressive work.
Really really well handled. Great to hear the other side and ultimately the web is amazing for these kinds of thoughtful open discourses…
Never mind Thor, any publicity is publicity, You just ended up with a lot of eye balls. I may actually use your service more, henceforth!
Thor: “Generally speaking, we’ve found that people either believe that all support is better provided through traditional/official channels (what you’re implying)”
I apologize for being unclear. It was not at all my intention to suggest that I thought “traditional/official channels” are better.
The problem I have is not with the official-ness of channels, but how *many* there are — especially when good ones already exist. There are already good Adobe forums, so why do we need another? For example, if there were even more GS-type companies, would that be better for me as a user? Would it be better for Adobe as a company?
The only way it wouldn’t completely suck is because they’re all implicitly linked by Google, so I can search them all at once. But if I didn’t *need* to use Google to search /N/ different support forums per company, I’d be even happier, as both a consumer and provider of services.
Thor,
Extracting from your letter to Jason, “After starting it, we noticed that everyone we talked to was frustrated with customer service with big companies. We hypothesized that the companies that needed open, honest customer interaction the most were those that were least likely to embrace it in a programmatic way. So we launched Get Satisfaction not only for companies to set up their own customer communities, but also to let customers start a community space around any brand they liked–to give them the same kind of soap box for results that you have with your blog, Signal vs Noise.”
This part makes some sense. What I’m then having trouble with is the implication of the first paragraph of text that appears on the GS home page, which reads as follows:
“Welcome to the place where questions really are frequently asked. Get Satisfaction brings customers and company employees together to make things better for everyone. Great answers and ideas can come from anywhere; we just do our part to get them to the people who can do something about it.”
Can you honestly say that this does not strongly imply that the support is provided by the company’s employees?
I really don’t think you guys really understand the nature of copy writing and the importance of clarity in what you write for the web.
I hope you find this helpful and while I wish you the best of luck, my personal advice to you would be to segment your site into two very distinct parts: (1) where companies are using your service as a platform for them to provide service (which I hope you charge for), and (2) the user-generated forum-type area where customers of a company can help each other. I would further advise you to make the mode of operation painfully clear on both.
Regards,
-Bob
@Bob Monsour: I agree with your general conclusion absolutely–that there needs to be a hard distinction between participating and non-participating companies. We’re working on this aggressively behind the scenes.
We’ll also take a fresh look at that front-page copy.
Thanks.
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You seem to be addressing this issue very quickly and in a credible manner.
Something else to consider changing: the “Welcome” message from GS when it establishes a new company listing. (I just saw the one on Micro Center.)
It says that this space is “dedicated to open conversation between customers and employees.” The implication of such a statement is that the company’s employees will see posts on that forum.
In any event, I’m sure that this kerfluffle is driving many people to your site. I’d frankly forgotten about GS until I saw Fried’s post, proving, perhaps, that any publicity is good publicity.
80% of new pages are added by employees of the company, huh?
Looks like your communication director is an employee of over 15,000 companies!
http://www.getsatisfaction.com/people/amy
as previously posted – please answer these
roger
Posted April 1, 2009 at 6:22 am
2 questions:
- Do you notify companies when you add them to this forum
- When you do, is there an easy to use (1-click) opt out button ?
If not, we all know what this is about.
-Roger
Me: These are both crucial points in determining whether you are offering a genuine service or a thinly disguised hijack and extortion racket. Strong words but this is a serious matter.
Also, nowhere could I find any details of the limitations of your free account.
There is too much FUD here – My instinct is telling me not to trust you – very loudly.
@Ewen: I answered the first two questions earlier in the comments:
http://blog.getsatisfaction.com/2009/03/31/open-letter-to-jason-fried/#comment-7669
We are completely open about our business, and have been since we launched two years ago. We only recently rolled out premium services and now the free product certainly could use more documentation. That’s not the result of obfuscation–we’re just a scrappy startup.
The way it works is that anyone can create a community around any brand or product, and anyone from the company can come in, claim to be an employee (which we then verify). Henceforth they can respond as an employee, with a badge that indicates their affiliation, and additional tools that allow them to create “official responses”, create official messages that are emblazened across the top of the site, add other employees, and additional customization options.
Paid services revolve around professional moderation tools, integration into other internal systems (e.g. Single Sign-in), branding control, and support.
I hope this helps explain it better.
Hi, “You Are Full of It”.
The topic that you see is a “Welcome” topic that is auto-generated whenever someone adds a company to Get Satisfaction. It’s just a default topic. I’m happy to explain exactly how this works, and you are also welcome to email me at eric [at] getsatisfaction [dot] com. I’ll do my best to explain it to you.
Thank you for your candid reply Thor. I appreciate your openness. I guess it is all-too easy to bash away at a keyboard in a one-way rant based on a scant understanding of what goes on behind the scenes. But … we saw what we saw and we reacted.
For the record, the only issue that still nags me is the “xxx has not yet committed to open conversations about its products or services.” I know you changed it when it was pointed out but the ethos behind that wording bugs me a little. I initially interpreted it as “well, they should be HERE and only HERE and we will make sure they NEED to be here”, seemingly dictating their arena for a conversation. I’m guessing you probably meant it more along the lines of “here are your users and here is where you CAN (as opposed to SHOULD) engage with them. Now that I think about it, it is the strength of the wording that bugged me. I think that was probably what bugged a lot of people. Oh, the irony, considering my skills of diplomacy.
I’m not so sure the ability for customers to start a discussion arena in a (eventually) paid forum, offsite from the owner is a good idea. I feel it dilutes and fragments support networks of those who have already established a focal point to engage their clients. Your SEO skills probably just add to the feeling of being hijacked (on Google) a little. I know there is a free option but we both know that to use this on a big scale you’d have to use a paid account. That’s where it feels ever-so slightly extortionate. That’s a strong word and one I will stop using since you are in the process of rectifying that situation.
I have also discussed this with Eric via email. He hinted at some changes afoot and I will be watching to see what goes on. Hey, everyone stuffs up occasionally and the internet is a very public stage. The only people who don’t frack up occasionally are the only people who never tried.
Let’s see how it goes after the dust settles, eh.
@Milo, you said:
“..I think you’ve treaded into a moral grey area by adding companies without their knowledge and without doing some due diligence to find their official support channels and linking to them, however arcane they may be.
“…But again, without an obvious link to official support, you are doing a disservice to both the customers and the company. If absolutely no official support exists, state so. Its better for everyone.”
One of the things that Thor, et al., have continually said is that GetSatisfaction support pages are either largely created by companies (80-90%), or by customers seeking support where none exists or where they’ve received inadequate support from “official channels” (10-20%). GetSatisfaction isn’t adding the “unofficial” support pages — dissatisfied customers are.
From a customer support / community management perspective, if a company doesn’t provide adequate support, their customers will get it somewhere else. It is a company’s responsibility to engage their customers wherever they congregate. If customers complain on Twitter, companies need to engage them on Twitter. If it’s on Google Groups, they need to engage them there. And if it’s on GetSatisfaction, then they’d better engage them there, too — even if it’s simply to say “Thanks! We’ve created a support ticket for the issue you’re experiencing on our official support site — we’d love to engage you there!” However, it is because many companies do not do this that GetSatisfaction has such a devoted (and satisfied) user base.
The best customer support occurs wherever customers ask for it.
I’m not so sure the ability for customers to start a discussion arena in a (eventually) paid forum, offsite from the owner is a good idea. I feel it dilutes and fragments support networks of those who have already established a focal point to engage their clients.
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I personally think customers suck most of the time. The few good ones should be treated as you would treat any other human being not a mythic “know-it-all-food-provider” entity that most of companies or freelancers think they are. Nobody is doing no one a favor, we all need services from one another. so let´s stop the “Customer is always right” or “Love your customers”. If they like your product they´ll buy it, I don´t think you should kiss their asses to get their money-based affection as a way to feel appreciated as a company or as a freelancer.
Your image links are broken in this post, makes some of the points confusing.
http://blog.getsatisfaction.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/headerold.gif , etc