Fastest Way to Lose Customers
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Author Archives: Thor Muller
Infographic: Why Does Gen Y Buy?
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Inside the Mind of a Community Manager
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In honor of Community Manager Appreciation Day we’ve prepped this infographic taking you inside the mind of today’s community manager. Click for full size:
Infographic: What Makes People Want to Follow a Brand?
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Without a doubt, a positive online brand experience creates loyal customers. As several studies have discovered, the majority of consumers who engage with a brand in the digital space – whether by participating in a contest or by ‘liking’ a brand on Facebook – tend to not only purchase the products, but also make recommendations to their friends and family. Click below for big-ass version.
Get Satisfaction Teams Up With Citrix To Provide One-Click Screen Sharing Access from Communities
Greetings from the Get Satisfaction Partner team! Today we are excited to announce a new product integration with Citrix GoToAssist, which will bring an even deeper quality of service to our joint customers.
Brands love Get Satisfaction because we provide the best place for them to engage their users. We give brands a place to listen, a place to resolve, and a place to allow community members to talk to one another and discuss products. Our ability to pump serious SEO juice into these conversations make Get Satisfaction topics a self-service support dream–resolve an issue once in our community and you can be sure that other users with the same question will find that topic next time they look for answers through organic search.
Sometimes, especially in highly technical products or help-desk scenarios, self-service just isn’t enough. Organizations may want to pull users out of Get Satisfaction conversations and into more private channels. Topic-to-ticket integrations solve this problem to some extent–but what if you want to provide live agent support right now, with full screen sharing capabilities, to further improve the time to resolution and customer satisfaction?
Enter the Citrix GoToAssist integration. Now, for our joint customers, Get Satisfaction users can escalate conversations into one-on-one sessions, first in chat and then in a remote desktop sharing session.
When users initiate a remote support session, they will be dropped into a chat session, where the agent can offer to begin a remote desktop sharing experience.
Once remote sharing begins, the end user and agent can work together to resolve the issue quickly and thoroughly. Not only does adding community to your live agent solution provide a self-service front end for your support process, it also provides a place where agents can return to post helpful hints so future customers can help themselves in the community.
We are excited to bring GoToAssist into our suite of integration partners and look forward to the value our joint offerings will bring to our customers!
To learn more about the integration, click here.
For instructions on how to install this integration (currently available to Get Satisfaction Enterprise customers only) check out configuration details in the Get Satisfaction Developer’s Community.
Get Satisfaction Engage: Social Conversations, Anywhere Your Customers Are
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Over the past year, we’ve been heads down at The Satisfactory listening, learning, and creating our next big move in this hyperactive “social-everything” marketplace.
From the early days of Get Satisfaction, we’ve been consistent and deliberate with our “outside in/ everywhere” strategy. We knew customers wanted (and are now demanding) an open and transparent place to connect with other like-minded people. They want to have a conversation that results in a productive outcome that ultimately creates a trusted relationship with the products, services, and brands they care about. We bet on the notion that trusted online relationships are the foundation of any good business.
From the hottest start-ups like Flipboard and OMGPOP to trusted brands like Intuit’s Mint.com and Pampers, companies of all sizes join Get Satisfaction’s network of 65,000 communities because they want to connect with their customers. Because they, too, believe that trusted online relationships are the foundation of any good business. And now, we’re making it easier than ever for companies to bring community to their customers, anywhere they are.
Today, we are thrilled to announce Get Satisfaction Engage: a new widget architecture that gives companies the ability to quickly create and change widgets that carry a seamless in-brand and in-application experience.
With Get Satisfaction Engage, you can bring community to any (or every) page of your website with just a couple of clicks, exposing relevant conversations that benefit both you and your customers. With Get Satisfaction Engage, customers can engage in conversation with other customers without ever having to leave your website. Your customers will be able to see the hottest topics being discussed, vote on ideas, and discover content that will bring them closer to your product, your marketing content, or the help section of your site.
Koodo uses Get Satisfaction conversations to connect with their customers around specific products
Get Satisfaction Engage is part of our Anywhere strategy: we enable companies to engage with their customers anywhere they are, whether it’s your website Facebook, search, or on a mobile device. Engage is in limited availability today and will be made available to all customers starting May 30th. You can see it in action on our website right now.
And as always, please visit our community for any questions, feedback, problems, or praise. We’ve built a world class customer engagement platform by listening to you and all of our customers, so let’s keep the conversation going.
Nyan Cat Office Prank
One of Get Satisfaction’s company values is Have Fun. In this spirit, and in light of our company-wide love for Nyan Cat, our nerds recently pulled an office prank of epic proportions. I’ll let Stephen Lee take it from here…
Recently our beloved developer Josh took a relaxing beach vacation to Mexico while the rest of us stayed behind to release a huge project. Naturally, we wanted to prank him in a way that would cause both joy and pain, and came up with the idea of tricking out his iMac with post-it notes (just the sticky parts) to create a large Nyan Cat mosaic!
The first challenge was finding all the colors we needed. Only two colors from our office stash were useful (light blue for the background and pop tart pink). We found most of what we needed at a nearby Daiso (orange, yellow, green, darker blue, purple, beige for the pop tart bread, brighter pink for the pop tart highlights), and had to improvise the final 3 colors (red, black, grey) with markers.
Next, we needed a way to provide a guideline on the screen that we could follow. One resourceful developer found this pattern, brought the image up on Josh’s screen and used Lion’s fine-controlled zooming to match the square size to the same width as our small post-its. Perfect.
Finally we got to work with an X-ACTO knife, scissors, and a few late nights / early mornings. In the end, we covered the entire screen with everyone’s favorite rainbow-pooping pop tart cat!
Below are an in-progress shot, some shots of the finished product, poor Josh tearing it down square by square, sometimes getting stabbed by sharp corners under his fingernails, and finally the glue-covered screen with a reflection of Josh wincing at his bleeding fingertips. Muahaha.
Putting it together
The finished product
The de-construction begins
Josh's fingertips hurt from picking off all of the post-its
UCLA Social Business Course
Dr. Natalie Petouhoff, a close friend of Get Satisfaction and me personally, is teaching a 2 day course at UCLA this Friday and Saturday. I highly recommend you attend.
This is going to be much more than a how-to on Twitter and Facebook…. what Natalie will present is a comprehensive review of how companies are re-inventing themselves as a result of how social media is transforming the customer relationship. Not surprisingly we have a view on this… however as social media becomes more ingrained in the customer experience our view is not that radical or surprising.
Customer service, marketing, and commerce activities are coming together and creating new opportunities for companies to acquire new customers as well as get more out of the ones they already have. The latter point can’t be overstated and this forms the basis of the argument that customer service is marketing… which itself is not a new proposition as companies as diverse as Nordstrom’s and Avis have been differentiating themselves on the basis of customer service long before social media existed.
But here lies the rub, having a good customer service experience is not by itself equivalent to having a good customer experience and part of the challenge that Natalie’s course will unravel is how companies must reinvent their approach to customer engagement and employee empowerment as much as embrace social media technologies.
We had an interesting situation yesterday that caused me to consider how this plays out in real life. At Get Satisfaction we have defined some company values that we aspire to live up to and far from the highly polished company values statements that are expressed in pitch perfect Victorian English, our values are easily expressed and often find their way into our conversations… yesterday we considered “walk in your customer’s shoes” and “we got your back”.
Starting early in the morning yesterday we received calls and emails from people inquiring about a $1 charge on their credit cards… and not knowing anything about who we are or why we were charging them. After 5-6 of these calls I started looking into the details and could find no customer or transaction records for any of the people calling in, and a review of our credit card gateway records revealed no $1 transactions. Very quickly I came to the conclusion that we were not the source of these transactions and the working theory shifted to a malicious third party spoofing our merchant account to an unrelated payment gateway and using it to run credit card numbers through at low value authorizations to see what would work.
We had a choice to make at this point. The traditional company response would be to respond with as little detail as possible, essentially that “these transactions are not from us and you should contact your bank”. That is exactly what you or I would get if we were on the customer end of a call to pick-your-favorite-big-company. We, Caty Kobe and myself as we were primarily dealing with this, talked about how we would want to be treated and decided on a different strategy.
We contacted each person and asked for some additional information, which revealed a pattern in that the majority of people impacted lived in the Santa Cruz area and all the cards affected were debit cards, and then we shared everything we knew, what we had done, and what we were going to report to law enforcement. We also were explicit that they should contact their bank and cancel their card, as well as report fraud, and to give our name and contact information to the fraud departments so that we could share all the information we had. Basically we tried to be as empathetic as possible because credit card fraud is stress inducing, and to share all the information we had to remove any possibility that we were not doing our level best to help.
The response we received was positive and if I have one overall objective for managing this experience it would be that I would want each of the people we talked with yesterday to think about us in their next customer experience and say “I wish Company X was like those folks at Get Satisfaction”. No one told Caty and I how to handle this, we did not have to have a series of meetings about policy and procedure, we consulted with our on staff legal person about what we could do to stop the fraud but not about our response, and then we just did it.
If more companies declared their values in simple terms and then empowered people to actually live up to them then the world would be a much easier place. This is why you should attend Natalie’s class, it will prepare you to not just use social media in business but also introduce you to how your business will change as a result.
ATTENDEES WILL:
- Leave with a social business blueprint and know how to execute with social media applications and software
- Learn practical tips, techniques, and how to use social media monitoring to levelset where your social media program is
- Take an assessment to benchmark the “as is” state of your social media initiatives and compare them to “could be” via best practices
- Learn how to gear your initiatives to higher monetizations of social media investments
- Create strategies and tactical plans that make sense to traditional organizations (even those not familiar with social media)
- Learn how to use business cases and ROI to ease the approval process for initiatives and implementation simpler, more efficient, and effective because they are grounded in business fundamentals that maximize the ROI in social media.
Zynga Draw Something Releases New Features Based on Customer Feedback
Zynga’s hyper-popular Draw Something added 3 new features today, all of them much requested by their customers. How do we know that they are highly requested, you ask?
All 3 features were identified and voted on by customers in the Get Satisfaction Draw Something community, which is now serving more than 100,000 dedicated community members and over 25 million pageviews this year thanks to the power of search referral and social network sharing:
Using Get Satisfaction for curating product ideas in your community works and what this means is that you will be able to build better products faster by connecting with your most engaged customers first.