Demand Satisfaction!

February 17, 2009

Big News: We’ve Got Ourselves a New CEO

We’ve got some exciting news here at the Satisfactory. Beginning today we have ourselves an amazing new CEO, the incomparable Wendy Lea.

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:

By Thor Muller | Posted in Satisfaction, company, news | Comments (9)

November 4, 2008

Announcing: Premium Services Now Available to Get Satisfaction Companies

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.

By Lane Becker | Posted in company | Comments (6)

August 25, 2008

I Love / Hate / Want to Rate You

What motivates an organization to become truly focused on improving their products and services for their customers? How about word of mouth? How about word-of-mouth squared?

I don’t know about you, but I rely on word-of-mouth observations nearly every single day, whether it’s asking a co-worker what they think of a local restaurant (which I did today, twice) or going online to scout out advice from real people about the best external hard drive to purchase (which I did last month; I settled on this one). That kind of authentic reccomendation is powerful.

There’s a simple way to take this natural compulsion people have to seek out advice from neutral parties and apply it to your business. Ready to find out how much someone loves or hates you? Ask them if they’d recommend you to a friend. This stark question yields a wealth of information.

When companies start to ask this one question, they can quickly see how many people (current, potential and former customers) are with them — and how many are against them. That’s valuable data. Again, it sounds simple, but there are a gaggle of brand-consulting firms out there who will cheerfully charge a company many thousands of dollars to answer these two simple questions: Do they love you or hate you? How much?

When companies start examining this kind of cut-and-dry (sometimes painfully honest) measurement, it can help them begin the process of actually listening to their customers. To help encourage that kind of customer-to-company interaction, we’ve added a new feature: You can now recommend or discourage people from using a company and its products.

It’s quite straightforward: Pick any company or product you see on Get Satisfaction and tell us how much you’d recommend it to a friend. It’s an excellent way to — by sheer force of numbers — show companies what everyone really thinks about their products and services. It’s a simple way of saying “numbers don’t lie”: We care this much; no more, no less. When companies see the results, they can very easily determine whether they’re doing enough… or need to do more.

We think this is one of the sharpest features we’ve introduced so far on Get Satisfaction, and we’re keenly interested in hearing what you think of it. In the near future, we’ll be using this information in ways that will help both consumers and companies. It’s the first of many new features we’re hard at work on that will really help everyone get more value out of the system.

Do you love/hate/want to discuss it? Fire away with your observations about our new feature — but only after you’ve already judged us on that same 10-point scale.

By Eric Suesz | Posted in Asides, Branding, Satisfaction, appearances, company, customer service, development, reputation | Comments (0)

April 14, 2008

Bad Apples Stealing Pints of Milk

“Apl.itunes has taken money from my account and I never ordered anything.”

That’s the title of a problem on Get Satisfaction started by a frustrated user who got swindled by someone pretending to be Apple. The number of people who have this problem keeps growing.

In researching the details, I’ve found out that this may be an updated version of what used to be called the “pint of milk” scam. The way that one worked: a thief would use a stolen debit or credit card to make a really tiny purchase — a pint of milk. Once that test transaction went through, they knew the card was open for business, so to speak. At least, that’s the urban legend I’ve heard (or the metaphor someone at some point assigned to this scam).

The iTunes Store works great for this kind of scam because people (me included, I just bought a song on iTunes this morning) get used to the idea of numerous $1 purchases winding their way through their stream of financial activity. Once you start buying songs like this, you just don’t pay attention to every single transaction that shows up in your records, if you pay attention at all.

What responsibility does Apple have in this matter? Any? Simply put: none. But that hasn’t stopped a deluge of people with this problem from blaming Apple for this scam on Get Satisfaction.

This is a public relations quandary that many companies have had to deal with. Even though Apple is just as much a victim in this case, staying silent about it won’t make it go away (in fact, this scam seems to be growing, and quickly). I would argue that Apple, just like any company with a very strong brand, would do well to publicize this kind of consumer fraud. Why? First and foremost, being seen as a champion of consumers is always good. You’ll always be rewarded for that. Second, you can’t control how your customers (or potential customers) talk about you online, but you can react to what they are saying — and you should. There are lots of other reasons I could list that recommend and support engaging with customers on this level, but there’s one paramount reason Apple should address this problem: Ignoring it will only encourage negative assumptions about iTunes to fester.

Like Thor, our CEO at Get Satisfaction, put it in a great blog post about defending your online reputation:

“It’s amazing how often people let spurious charges go unanswered in a public forum. It seems that most people and organizations have two modes online, silent or litigious. There’s another approach: responsiveness. The trick is to not respond in a reactionary style, which can create a destructive blowback effect, but rather in the measured and calming tone of someone who is better informed. Your job is to correct facts, provide the missing context, clarify the intentions.”

I’m a huge (huge!) Apple fan, but that does sound like Apple: either silent or litigious. I sent some friendly messages to Apple PR reps about this problem, but I’ve yet to get a response. I hate to see Get Satisfaction users having these kinds of problems. I bet even a sympathetic nod would do the trick.

If you have knowledge or experience with this particular scam — or want to offer your own sympathetic nod — join the conversation here.

[Apple is on Get Satisfaction.]

By Eric Suesz | Posted in company, customer service, philosophy | Comments (4)

April 11, 2008

The Great Twitter Business Experiment

Everywhere I turn, it’s Twitter this and Twitter that. That has been the case in my private life for some time, but now Twitter seems to be growing fast, and I’m seeing Twitter everywhere I look. And, I love it.

Businesses are, predictably, trying to figure out how to leverage the value of Twitter for the extended enterprise (or some such nonsense). Well, let me clue you into the “low-hanging fruit” when it comes to using Twitter for business purposes: It’s a stupendously easy way to find out what your customers are saying about your products. Just as you might use Get Satisfaction as a conduit for customer opinion and ideas, you can use Twitter to “track” keywords and eavesdrop on your customers. Just be ready to hear what they have to say.

Yesterday, ReadWriteWeb published an article about how to get going on that front, and I thought that our readers might want to check it out, if they haven’t already. If you’re an employee who cares what people say about your company, here’s your weekend assignment: Read this article, set yourself up a Twitter account, and start following the conversation.

You might find that everything you think you know about your customers is wrong. Or right. Bet you can’t wait to find out.

[Twitter is on Get Satisfaction.]

By Eric Suesz | Posted in Tips and tricks, company, customer service | Comments (2)