Author Archives: Thor Muller

Thor Muller is CEO & Co-founder of Satisfaction. You can find out more about him here: http://thormuller.com/netpositive

July 15, 2009

Introducing Get Satisfaction 2.0: A New Take on Customer Community

It’s not very often that we use version numbers for our software releases, for the simple reason that we’re unveiling improvements all the time (it’s the Web after all). Today, however, we’re launching an update so significant that we’re smacking a big 2.0 sticker on it. It’s a huge leap forward, building on what people love about Get Satisfaction while integrating the tremendous learning and feedback we’ve had since launching our service almost two years ago. Perhaps most importantly, this is a new frame for customer community that will support the many improvements and feature releases coming in the months ahead.

Get Satisfaction is about harnessing the social web to improve online customer support, and with this release we’re raising the bar in just about every way.

A Social Support Hub – Organizations may communicate in an increasing number of ways, and Get Satisfaction now provides a unified hub for connecting customers to the right people, wherever they are. The community may be emerging as the center of customer communications, but it’s intimately linked to distributed conversations on Twitter & Facebook, official channels like email and phone, or even Get Satisfaction partners like Zendesk, the popular helpdesk software. Get Satisfaction ties it all together.

Simplicity itself – Get Satisfaction 2.0 refreshes the user interface to enhance usability and present content in simple, easy-to-digest ways. Its never been easier to search, browse or interact, encouraging participation from a wider range of people.

Curated Views – Based on our structured convers ations we’re excited to announce a new feature, Content Auto-Curation. By leveraging the natural activity of your community we’re now presenting useful sets of topics, things like frequently asked questions, common problems, popular ideas and many more. The hidden value of conversations is unlocked for the first time.

Focus on results – Get Satisfaction has always focused on helping reach their desired outcomes, whether that was an answer, a solved problem, an idea implemented as a new feature or product. Get Satisfaction 2.0 highlights which topics need input from the community, and prominently features answers and answerers.

Customer-to-customer help – This new release puts a new emphasis on customers connecting with each other to answer questions and solve problems. Through positive participation, every user can now earn reputation (and possibly win the coveted Champions status) within the community.

Customizable, Configurable Widget Toolkit – We’re famous for allowing organizations to embed community through their products and web sites via our widgets. Get Satisfaction 2.0 includes a new premium widget toolkit: now you can fully configure and customize four different kinds of widgets that make plugging community content into your site as easy as cut-and-paste. Filter suggested content, auto-tag new topics, customize the look-and-feel and more.

Choose your own participation level – Not all organizations use Get Satisfaction in the same way–some don’t use it at all while their customers do. This release includes a new feature that allows an organization to set its participation level and a personal message to users, in order to set the right expectations about how its relationship to the Get Satisfaction community.

And those are just a few of the highlights. For details check out our in depth overview of Get Satisfaction 2.0. Do let us know what you think!

By Thor Muller | Posted in Satisfaction, news | Comments (12)
July 15, 2009

Maintenance in progress: Big updates coming

We are excited to announce that as of 2:48am Pacific Standard Time, we are wrapping up the biggest release of our software since we launched 20 months ago. As part of this, we’ve completed a significant upgrade to our server operations to provide all of our users a more reliable performance. We’d hoped to avoid any downtime at all, but we did decide to roll our systems offline for a few minutes in these off-peak hours to make the transition as gracefully as possible. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience and the last minute notice, but expect you will think the momentary frustration well worth it.

As for details of our operational update: In addition to increasing our server resources by almost 3x, we have updated some key pieces of our underlying software (Ruby, to be specific) that increases the robustness of our platform. We are also tuning and monitoring our search systems closely, and allocating more resources for email delivery. While we’ve always cared about great performance, we have grown to the point where it is becoming one of our chief obsessions.

By Thor Muller | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (0)
April 8, 2009

Help us review a new page design!

One of the projects we’re working on is a new version of the community overview page for each organization, and today I’d like to invite you to take a look at a draft design and give us any feedback that you think would help us improve it. But first, let me fill you in on some background.

Most customer support communities on Get Satisfaction have some level of employee involvement (about three-quarters), but the rest are added and cultivated by customers. Some of these are very active, and others have little or no activity. Our recent redesign of the page wrapper and header was aimed primarily at helping organizations who want to use Get Satisfaction as an official or semi-official customer community. But it’s also very important to us to serve the customers of non-participating organizations in a way that honors those organizations and allows them to promote their preferred support channels. Above all, we want clarity about what Get Satisfaction is in relation to any organization in our system, whether they use us as a primary support system or have opted out of all involvement. In fact, the code name for this release is Clarity.

We’re viewing these support communities as “spaces’ that can be modified depending on the needs of the customer. In addition to these changes, we’re also planning more ways for organizations to personalize their space. This draft design focuses on the instance of the community overview page in which an organization is not participating (”unclaimed”). Our goals for this page are as follows:

  • Communicate the purpose of the site to people unfamiliar with Get Satisfaction
  • Display in the clearest of terms the organization’s level of participation
  • Provide a transparent path for an organization to claim their space or opt-out
  • Point users to the organization’s preferred support channel, and feature links to other places on and offline where they may communicate with the organization
  • Expose the Get Satisfaction customer community (latent or realized) around this organization, and provide a simple way for a user to self-identify as a customer
  • Provide ways for users to interact (e.g. discuss, rate) around the organization and its products/services, again in a way that honors it

The draft below is unfinished, and not a fully rendered visual design. So please keep that and our goals in mind as you review it.

The Unclaimed Community Overview Page


View full-size image

Below is a brief explanation of each part of the design.

1. Organization name and participation indicator

First off, you’ll notice that there is no logo here. For non-participating organizations we will no longer be displaying logos uploaded by users in the header. Instead we will display the organization name under the default descriptor “People-powered customer support for.” The phrase “People-powered” is intended to convey the distributed, crowd-sourced approach that we’re all about. (For participating companies we’ll still display the logo)

Below the organization name is the Participation Status, which says that this organization is Not yet Participating. By placing it in bold type treatment right under the logo we hope to be crystal clear about the role of the organization here. Other organizations may have a Participation Status like one of the following:

Cyberdyne Systems is Active in this Community

Cyberdyne Systems is Monitoring but not Active

Cyberdyne Systems has Opted Out of this Community

We’re still working on the language, but that’s the general idea. Organizations will be able to set the status to the one that makes the most sense, and change it at any time.

2. Get Satisfaction Explanation

To the right of the organization name we display boilerplate text explaining what Get Satisfaction is. We will also display a link to the user who added the organization to Get Satisfaction to display the customer-created origins of these unclaimed organizations.

Under the explanatory text is a link that invites employees of this organization to claim or set their status as explained above. This will open a new page with the options to proceed. It’s worth noting here that Get Satisfaction validates the employee relationship with every initial claim.

3. Support Links

We’ll be adding a link box that prominently features the official support channels for the organization, wherever they are. This might be a 1-800 phone number, an email address, one or more help pages, even a UserVoice feedback forum. Our goal is to direct people to the best place for getting results with that organization.

Part of this link box will provide social media links. We’d like to connect customers with the organization not just at its official support channels, but anywhere it is interacting online (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, etc). Anybody may submit links or contact info to fill this area out, and employees will be able to manage the link box.

4. Customers Spotlight

Here we’re showing some of the customers that have associated themselves with this organization on Get Satisfaction. Visitors may add themselves to this membership by clicking the I’m a Customer, Too! button. We’re also showing other organizations and products that these users are affiliated with.

5. Rate the Organization

We’ll continue to let users rate organizations and their products using the well established Net Promoter Score. This is the lightest weight satisfaction survey, used by many of the top brands in the world to understand how customers perceive them.

6. Post a topic to the community

The main difference here from the current site is the revised headline, “Ask a Question of Cyberdyne Customers.” Since no employees from the organization are here, we’re marking this as a place for conversations between customers.

So that’s the draft. We’re looking forward to any feedback you have. We’ll be making similar changes for the support overview page for participating organizations, as well as providing greater layout control of their space. This is but one piece of a larger redesign effort that we’re in the midst of, so please continue to make your general suggestions here: Get Satisfaction Ideas. We’ll be posting more sneak previews of upcoming features in coming days and weeks.

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By Thor Muller | Posted in design | Comments (30)
April 8, 2009

Get Satisfaction 101

A lot has happened since we launched Get Satisfaction in September 2007, but one thing that has remained remarkably steadfast is our vision. In fact, we’re always amazed when we look back at design sketches from the early brainstorming days at how much of our product and philosophy was clear to us then. Over the last two years Lane, Amy and I have elaborated at length about our big ideas, joined by a chorus of many others, but it’s easy to forget that most of the visitors to our site have little idea about what makes us tick. Since our service is in the midst of some big changes, with many more to come, this seems like a great time to re-introduce our mission.

For starters, there’s a little mantra we have at Get Satisfaction: the more we empower customers the more that good companies thrive. It seems to us like this idea is taking off in a big way. Smart organizations are now jumping at the chance to give their customers a loud voice in their affairs, and help connect them with each other to spark new kinds of social value around their products. We’re thrilled to be partnering with so many of them in this effort.

At the same time, some of the most productive customer communities are those where the company is only marginally involved, or isn’t involved at all. Famously independent communities like TivoCommunity and Mini2 have been as productive and beneficial to their associated brands as any company-sponsored community. Apple products have spawned dozens of unofficial communities in addition to its official one. Over and over we’ve seen that engaged customers can be as capable as organizations at forging meaningful connections around the products they love. Everyday, people are transforming organizations from the outside-in.

Because of this, we reject the false choice between people-powered customer support and company-centered support. In fact, we see them as two sides of the same coin.

Once upon a time, branding meant maintaining control over all the places that customers interact with it, whether that was the telephone, Web, print, or events. If the brand sponsored an online community it was with the overriding concern of preserving a “safe brand experience.” This necessarily meant corporate censorship, and it meant the forum was so marginalized even people inside the company might not know it existed.

But the world looks a lot different today. Companies as diverse as Comcast, H&R Block, Whole Foods, Timbuk2 and countless smaller companies are building their brands by engaging outside of the safety zone. Organizations are increasingly going to where their customers are, to services like Twitter, Facebook and yes, Get Satisfaction. Heck, it’s so prevalent I even get Twitter replies from the San Francisco Zoo staff when i take my kids there. We’re seeing the emergence of community spaces and tools that serve the *relationships* between people inside and outside of the company, where each side has the tools and the accountability to do right by each other. This may once have been an overly idealistic notion, but it is fantastically with us today, and it is changing the world.

…

Still, there aren’t many businesses that are exactly parallel to Get Satisfaction. The service is a hybrid of consumer social networking and business software-as-a-service. As a result, people can sometimes draw the wrong conclusions about how it works. Here’s a brief Q&A:

Q. Why is Get Satisfaction creating all these community spaces around other brands?
A. The vast majority are added by employees of these organizations, and the rest are added by customers themselves in the course of seeking a way to be heard and get support results. An upcoming version of each community overview page will actually link to the person who added the organization to GS. We do not add organizations to the system in bulk.

Q. Are organizations coerced into participating? What if they already have a community or support site?
A. They are under no obligation or duress to participate. In fact, we give every organization free tools to point visitors to their preferred support channels, as well as set a featured message of their choice to any users that visit the site. In addition, we no longer display advertising on any of our free support community pages.

Q. Can organizations remove themselves completely from GS?
A. They may request a removal if there are no customer interactions, but we allow users to add it back if they wish to establish customer-to-customer community. We’re rolling out a feature that will allow a company to state clearly that they have “opted out” of participating, so they will not be contacted by us again.

Q. GS Community pages often appear above the organization’s own web site in Google search results. Isn’t this brand hijacking?
A. While we’re proud that search engines rank our pages highly, we have no direct control over the position that our pages appear. More importantly, we have absolutely no desire to create confusion in the minds of users. We are continually refining our design and copy to be clearer and more effective at expressing the purpose of our site, and our relationship to the organizations people are discussing. We’re open to feedback on this, too: drop us a note.

As always, the best way to get to the top of Google is to do a good job being a member of the web community, having clear, concise, and well-architected web pages, and supporting your users to the best of your ability.

Q. Do you contact organizations when they’ve been added by a customer?
A. We sometimes will reach out to organizations that have a lot of activity around them. However, thanks to Google Alerts and other buzz monitoring tools employees usually discover the activity before we have the chance to connect. One problem with reaching out to companies is that many of them do not publish contact details, and the ones they do publish do not always lead to a response. It’s this fact that often drives people to express themselves on Get Satisfaction. We help customers and organizations meet in the middle!

That wraps up Get Satisfaction 101. We are always on, and eager to hear from you. Make your comment below or op on over to our community and let us know what you think. That’s what it’s all about.

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By Thor Muller | Posted in new rules, philosophy | Comments (7)
March 31, 2009

Open Letter to Jason Fried

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:

Old Get Satisfaction 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.

Customer-Company Pact badge

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).

New Get Satisfaction header

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.

By Thor Muller | Posted in customer service, philosophy, reputation | Comments (51)