One of the things I love best about working with the team here at Get Satisfaction is how focused they are on the real opportunity the events of the last couple of days have presented. Emotionally challenging as it can be to suddenly have the eyes of the world cast down upon your service, and difficult as it is to wade through the tone of some of the language that was used in the heat of the moment, the team has really risen to the occasion. From our initial discussions, where everybody on the team tried to take the blame from what happened, to the tech team’s willingness to quickly make the changes that could be made quickly, to the business team’s acknowledgement that some things just aren’t worth the revenue, it’s been quite a revealing and cathartic couple of days. We’re definitely a stronger, more focused team as a result.

Still, we’re not done. We knew there were simple changes to make, and we made them. But we also know there are some much deeper issues we need to grapple with, specifically around how we represent the areas where customers are actively engaging with each other but companies aren’t (and sometimes don’t want to!) participate.

We love having companies active inside Get Satisfaction, or using Get Satisfaction as a critical component of their customer service strategy, but we also still believe there’s a strong need for spaces where customers can talk to each other outside the company’s walls. Unfortunately, as recent events have born out, we’ve done a terrible job with our most recent redesign of making it clear which of the areas in Get Satisfaction are company-supported and which aren’t. We recognize that there are a number of significant changes that need to be made — from the look and feel of those pages, to the language we use, to the way certain elements are presented — in order for this difference to be made as clear and explicit as possible.

We are going to fix this.

But it is going to take us a little bit of time, because these are not quick changes — they require time to design, time to vet, and time to implement — and because we’re determined to make sure we’re effectively addressing the issues at hand, we’re going to check and double-check and then triple-check them before they go out. And we would ask everybody who’s involved, in the spirit of the third point of the Company-Customer Pact, to please be understanding and give us the time necessary to make these changes.

Which isn’t to say that we don’t want your help! We welcome your suggestions, your criticisms, your feedback — that’s the whole point of Get Satisfaction, after all! And in that spirit, it was with a lot of gratitude this morning, with the need for all these changes floating around in my head, that I read Jason’s most recent post, in which he details out the changes he wants to see us make on Get Satisfaction in order to effectively communicate that it’s not officially sanctioned by 37signals. He makes a number of excellent points and suggestions, complete with visuals! We are absolutely going to use this as the starting point for redesigning these areas, and we’re grateful for the input.

A few of you Web old-timers like me might remember that back before they were a web app powerhouse, 37signals was a fantastically talented design consulting firm, working on other peoples’ sites before they started launching their own. Though they’ve since moved on to sharing their knowledge through their books, applications, workshops, and conferences, I’ve always felt a little sad at the thought that I’d never be able to get their eye directly on something I was doing. But how lucky are we that we just got a little bit of consulting love from Jason Fried? I know some companies that would probably pay millions for the opportunity, and we just got it for free.

Well, mostly for free. Because, Jason, next time you and the 37signals team are in San Francisco, I’m buying the drinks.

As a company dedicated to improving the world of customer service (no small task!), we’ve worked hard over the past year to provide a service at no cost that companies can use to enhance their communication with their customer base. Since we launched in September 2007, it’s been amazing to see the thousands of companies that are using us to better communicate with their customers, and often reducing traditional support costs in the process.

Now, we’re about to enter a new phase in our company’s growth: We’re charging money.

Starting today, companies will have the choice between continuing to use our free service, now supported by advertising, or instead upgrade to one of our premium subscription services that we’re rolling out. Do nothing and your service will continue as before, but with integrated ads. And for companies with bigger needs, we’re excited to introduce our Basic and Pro packages, which come with significantly expanded management functionality.

With these new tools you’ll be able to take control of your community content without losing the transparency that Get Satisfaction is known for, and you’ll gain a new management interface that will save you hours each week. These are essential features for harnessing the full power of your growing customer community.

For those of you who can’t wait to get started, step right up and check out our product tour.

For the rest of you who might want a little bit of information first, here are the details:

Get Satisfaction Basic

The Basic “Moderation” Package is available today (at a special introductory price of $99 for three months!) for all current Get Satisfaction communities. It includes:

* Management View: Keep on top of the most important customer conversations all in one place. View and manage all your company’s topics in a streamlined, compact interface, with numerous sorting and filtering options for at-a-glance task management. Set status for multiple topics all on the same page.

* Topic Moderation: Edit topic titles and change topic types to make them more findable and relevant. Bury outdated and obsolete topics so they no longer show up in search results. Redirect older or duplicate topics to more authoritative topics on Get Satisfaction or even to pages on your own site.

* Editorial Controls: Remove inappropriate user content. Remove inappropriate topics. Move topics meant for a different company to another community in Get Satisfaction.

* Change Log: When you make these changes, we’ll note it in a “Change Log” that all users can access, in order to preserve the promise of transparency and open communication. Here’s an example of it in action in our own Get Satisfaction area.

* Advertising free: Unlike our free version, which is supported by integrated advertising, premium packages contain no ads.

We’re offering an introductory price of $99 total for a three-month trial period, during which time we will be rolling out even more productivity tools as part of Basic. After the three month period is over, you can choose to cancel or continue the service at the price of $120/month (billed annually) or $149/month (billed monthly).

This offer is available to current users of Get Satisfaction as a thank you to the companies who have helped us grow to where we are today, but it ends at the end of the day on Monday, November 10th, so hurry up and subscribe!

Full details on Get Satisfaction Basic.

Still have questions about Basic? Email us for more info.

Get Satisfaction Professional

Interested in single sign-on and commercial API access? We also offer a Pro package that includes everything in Basic as well as our single sign-on FastPass technology, which removes the need for your registered users to create a separate Get Satisfaction account.

Pricing for Pro starts at $349 a month, includes commercial API access as well, and is tiered based on usage. We’ll be announcing more Pro features soon as well.

Interested in Pro? Fill out the form on this page or call (415) 830-6765 for more information.

Always free to get started

Can’t afford this yet? Don’t worry! The existing level of service, including our cool new Feedback Widget, was, is, and will remain free.

In fact, we’re even giving you access to a new “lite” version of the Management View, which you can access via the “Management” tab at the top right of your company’s home page on Get Satisfaction. We’re also including some new searching and sharing tools that you’ll see at the top of every topic page on our site.

Are you using the Feedback Widget yet? You should. It’s awesome. Check it out.

Let’s talk

Questions? Problems? Ideas? Praise? You can email us, or, as always, contact us via Get Satisfaction. Also, please feel free to post your questions or feedback over here on our topic about the Premium Services.

Our goal with the API is to expose every part of the Get Satisfaction service, so that companies and customers alike who have clever ideas about how to integrate, build on top of, and/or extend the Get Satisfaction service can just do that. All sorts of possibilities await: Recreate your company’s area in Get Satisfaction entirely on your own site. Or recreate Get Satisfaction for more than just one company — do it for a whole class of products and services, and prove your expertise across an entire category. Maybe you don’t like the way our posting or topic listing page works? Make your own! Dig in deep and integrate relevant topics right into your online product catalog, or mash our topics up with your already existing discussion or comment groups. Built a couple of widgets to show off your answers on your own blog. Or create some clever visualizations that help you better understand what your customers are saying (I hear Google can help with that.)

In other words, do whatever seems like it’ll be fun, interesting, stunning, and/or useful. And while you’re doing that, we’re going to keep working to make it better, faster, and easier to use our API. To that end, we’ve got a couple of things going on:

• We’ve put together both Ruby and PHP libraries for the API, to help you get up and running quicker.
• We’ve fully embraced OAuth as our third party identification protocol of choice, to ensure seamless, user-friendly, and secure account integration between Get Satisfaction and all the companies that choose to work with us. No need to create Yet Another Account to use Get Satisfaction — now you can pass your customers directly into our system and auto-create/link accounts together (with their permission, of course.) You can read more about how to work with our OAuth implementation, and we’ll be talking more about the benefits of OAuth right on this here blog in the next couple of days.
• And just to be coy and teasing: we’ve got a few more API-related tricks up our sleeve in the coming weeks and months, so keep an eye out for those.

Of course, we’re ready to discuss all your API-related questions, problems, ideas, likes, and dislikes right here in Get Satisfaction. I may have said this before, but it bears repeating: We can’t wait to see what you come up with! So once your creation has made it out into the world, please be sure to let everybody know.

On Tuesday, we presented at the Dow Jones Web Ventures 2008 conference, and we just learned we were chosen as one of their top ten startups out of the full list of 70.

This sits nicely on the mantelpiece next to the audience pick for “Best of Show” we got yesterday, for our song and dance at the Under the Radar conference put on by Dealmaker Media, which Eric mentioned in his earlier post.

How sweet is that? To celebrate we ordered pizza and took silly photos of ourselves.

Just a little bragging here on a Friday afternoon. Enjoy the weekend, everybody!

But along the way we realized that anecdotal evidence — even solid, practical, billion-dollars-a-year-in-revenue evidence — while a strong start, just wasn’t enough. And so we asked ourselves: How can we help evolve the conversation that companies and customers are having? What can we bring to the table that will help these companies communicate better — more effectively, more honestly, more transparently — with their customers? What hasn’t been said but needs to be?

With this goal in mind, we launched at the Summit an essentially open source document we’re calling, simply, The Company-Customer Pact.

This pact is a call for shared responsibility between companies & customers — one that promises that both sides will hold up their end of the bargain to change the game. The document provides a way to opt into a set of shared values. It’s a balanced statement of responsibilities for companies and customers.

You might wonder why we need this, as it seems like common sense. But if common sense were enough more people would be employing these principles now. We’ve been trained by the bad habits of corporate culture to turn away from the anger of alienated customers reacting to an environment where it’s common place for companies to hide behind phone trees, avoid fault, and employ anonymous and in-human call centers that makes them hard if not impossible to reach. Or by engaging in practices like price-gauging and issuing confusing bills and policies.

And what’s the customers response to this, now that, thanks to the tubes that power the Internet, the customers can respond? More often than not it’s revolt, whether led by one man’s descent into Dell Hell or an entire (digg)nation rising up to defend their right to recite a seemingly random string of letters and numbers. But revolt, as any Frenchman from the 18th century will tell you, while thrilling, isn’t particularly pleasant, and it’s definitely not sustainable. We need another way.

Previous attempts at such documents usually end up coming from the company side as a “Consumer’s Bill of Rights,” the most notable of which was put forth by JFK in a speech he gave in 1962. (Never heard of it? Yeah, neither had we.) A customer bill of rights is a start, but that’s unilateral disarmament. This pact is bilateral disarmament; both sides holster their flamethrowers and try to work it out.

The central thesis of the Company-Customer Pact is that at some point we are all working on behalf of a company, and at the same time we are all customers. We all spend time on either side of that fence, and we should take our understanding of each of those roles into whatever situation we’re in. In that regard, while this Company-Customer Pact speaks to two sides, it’s really speaking to one side — the human side.

Customers can expect more from a company that’s signed onto this document. And whie it’s impossible for a company to tell its customers how to behave, they can certainly ask, and by opting into a pact like this they can imply a sense of shared responsibility with their customers. And a statement like this can even give a company’s internal teams some guiding principles for their behavior.

This is an open initiative — a living document. We want your feedback, which is why we’ve posted it on a wiki where anyone can comment or edit. Keep in mind, though, that one of the goals is to have it be simple enough that anyone can adopt it. It contains five basic tenets:

1. The first point reiterates, because it can’t be said enough, the golden rule of “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

2. The second point warms against the temptation to anonymity, because more often than not, in commercial settings anonymous often gives license to be rude.

3. The third point reflects the fact that we all know in advance that mistakes wil be made and that problems are going to happen — to err is human, after all, and we’re both humans on either side of the line. We can embrace this as an opportunity to deal honestly with problems as they arise; done right, this is where lasting customer relationships are forged. Who hasn’t had the experience of seeing a company turn a bad situation around, creating a tremendous amount of customer loyalty?

4. The fourth point is about companies embracing the opportunity of instant, always-on communication. Now that it’s easier than ever before to get the word out to hundreds of our friends and co-workers, it’s somehow harder than ever to communicate with some of the companies we do business with. There is absolutely a mandate to make honest and direct communication between companies and customers as easy and frictionless as it is with the people you friend on Facebook.

5. Finally, it’s vital to show follow-through and to support those who are trying to follow through. It’s a new world, and we all have to live in it together, so let’s cut each other some slack, ok?

Pretty simple all said and done, but also potentially very powerful. If you haven’t done so yet, check it out at ccpact.com and add your name — as a customer, as a company representative, or as both. We’d love to have you take part in the conversation.