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!

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.

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.

View full-size image

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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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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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.

After over two years of building a product and company with broad adoption (over 12000 companies and 1.5 million monthly customers!), we’ve reached a major inflection point as we roll out the value-packed business services that we believe will become essential to how companies do business in coming years. With this move, we’re deepening the leadership on our team to deliver on Get Satisfaction’s full potential.

We feel incredibly fortunate to have found Wendy Lea. From the first time we met her (through mutual friends, Dave McClure and Eric Case) we recognized her as an extraordinary fit for our business. As the VP Marketing at OnTarget, and the SVP of eBusiness Consulting at Siebel, she knows how to deliver results to business customers. As an investor, advisor, board member and interim CEO at numerous Web 2.0 companies, she comes with the relationships and insight that you just don’t see very often. Most importantly, she grokked our big vision immediately, and proved a natural fit for our culture.

As the founding CEO I’m now handing over the keys to her with nothing but enthusiasm. In my new role as Get Satisfaction’s Chief Technology Officer, I’ll be focusing on expanding our platform to keep wowing our customers in a way that’s built to scale (and last). And boy do I have some big plans!

As always, I can be reached at Thor at Getsatisfaction dot com.

Related:

• Venturebeat’s coverage
• The official press release
• Wendy’s personal blog announcement

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.

Satisfaction is a neutral party in all this: our goal is to help customers and companies communicate better with one another. In most cases this just means providing a better platform for everyone to talk. In this Facebook issue, we’ve gone a step further by stirring the pot on behalf of the frustrated users, culminating in a heads up I sent to TechCrunch.

This isn’t because we think the company’s basic policies are wrong. In all likelihood they’re in the best interest of their core community, and we’re all for enforcing standards of behavior in online communities. We do it all the time here. However, we are and will always be tireless in advocating for open communication between companies and their customers because this is how long-term, trusted relationships are built. In this case, Facebook’s “opaqueness,” as TechCrunch describes it, is creating real alienation amongst users. We think there’s a lesson here for all companies.

We’re not so naive that we think that a company like Facebook can or should reveal everything about its internal systems, nor discuss private issues regarding individual accounts out in the open. But by reinforcing the image of itself as an impenetrable fortress, where all communication is allowed only on its terms, Facebook sends the message that it’s afraid of its own users. Now granted, some of its users may in fact be dangerous (and we’ve met a few that fit that bill, certainly), but for the rest of us who are investing in Facebook with our time we should expect more. Facebook should be speaking to us in a human voice, tell us where they’re coming from, listen attentively when we want to share, and sometimes engage with us on our terms. Because businesses depend on the goodwill of their users to make things work, they need us to build their business.

The goodhearted, hardworking customer service team at Facebook doesn’t deserve to be villainized for doing what it takes to keep their delicate business running smoothly. But it is time that companies recognize that there are hard costs incurred when they choose to only present a closed, institutional public face.

How much more productive would it be if Facebook posted a response in Satisfaction that helps people understand the company’s actions better? Perhaps something like this:

“Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to share their experiences here. It helps those of us here at Facebook to understand how we can do a better job, and we are deeply sorry when we make mistakes that inconvenience our users. Please know that we’re working overtime to protect the fun, safe environment that we’re known for. Consequently, when it comes to our terms of use we generally err on the side of enforcement, but we are careful to review each case if users appeal the action (by sending a note to appeals@facebook.com). This can take some time, of course, and we appreciate your patience if you find yourself in this position. We have every interest in getting non-offending users back into their accounts as quickly as possible.

Finally, we will try harder to communicate more frequently here about the ongoing changes we’re making to improve your experience. Even if things don’t always work perfectly we’re committed to working with you over time to make Facebook all it can be. Once again, thanks for caring enough to express yourself about Facebook!”

In the meantime, we here at Satisfaction continue to welcome Facebook’s participation in the discussion.

NEW COMPANIES ON SATISFACTION
Wakoopa is a social network for your software
While Web apps are making a lot of noise, there’s been an explosion of useful desktop software of all shapes and sizes on the Mac and PC. The Web just makes this an embarrassment of riches. Wakoopa tracks your software use the same way Last.fm tracks your music and then shows this to you and your friends to help you discover new tools and such. The information they’re collecting could be extraordinarily helpful for giving software developers a new way to connect with potential users. Plus it’s just fun to play with.

COMMUNITY MANAGEMENT TIP
We’re constantly impressed by how effortlessly Timbuk2 embraces transparency in their customer support process. They’re always nice, always helpful, and always patient, or so it seems. Even when something goes wrong and a customer starts making extreme demands they manage to keep a smile on their face. Which is precisely the suggestion I’m making: pick an avatar (personal icon) of yourself with a big smile on your face. It’s a lot harder for people to be cruel when you’re flashing your disarming smile at them. And it magnifies every kind word you utter.

EVENTS THIS WEEK
Look for Lane and I at O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Summit this week. We’ll be there!

This week, at two separate events, members of the Satisfaction team are talking about what we’re working on.

I hope we’ll see some of you there!