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.

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.

This week, Twitter got a big boost in traffic to its Web site from an ABC News Story that showed how an everyday consumer got help from Comcast’s Frank Eliason on Twitter (we’ve written about similar things on this blog in the past). I’ve gone ahead and coined a silly phrase for this kind of outreach: “micro-service”. Thank me later.

All that mainstream-media-led traffic inevitably led to additional traffic to Get Satisfaction, and we were inundated with a wealth of people who had a lot to complain about, but who hadn’t ever used Twitter or Get Satisfaction before. Unexpected events like this are always a great way to see how well we’re framing our service. If they don’t get it, perhaps we aren’t explaining it well enough.

I’m seeing a lot of stories like this ABC News story popping up. Reporters are trying to find a way to write about Twitter, and they seem to want to frame the story in a particular way. More stories like these are surely coming, and most of them will probably be following up on the same Comcast/Twitter story that’s already been written by other, more astute journalists.

I wouldn’t mind seeing stories about Twitter that focus less on complaints. There’s so much more to Twitter. Tons more. When they frame the story as “how to complain and get a company’s attention” rather than “look at all this unexpected interestingness that comes out of new ways of communicating,” I don’t know that they’re accomplishing much — beyond prompting the big complainers to reach out and rant to someone.

Not that I’m complaining too loudly myself. They’re reporting on customer service. That’s a start. More please! I’m ready to direct the traffic.

How do you encourage companies that are hesitant to participate on Get Satisfaction?

We’ve got a lot of theories on that. I won’t go into all of them, but there are some companies — often larger companies with an entrenched beauracracy, for example — who don’t participate on our site. They may simply not know about us yet, may not understand what we’re up to, or they may have a big wall set up to discourage customers from contacting them. They often seem to have a culture that doesn’t embrace the idea that communicating with customers openly and honestly is the way to go about things. What is the best way to reach that kind of company?

Again, we have a lot of ideas. But it seems immediately clear that the companies that feel compelled to participate do so because their customers want them to. Or, to put it another way: Their customers ask them to join the conversation on Get Satisfaction. So, they do.

Being invited, asked, and encouraged is the flip side of being compelled, shamed, and threatened. It would be ideal if companies received an invitation from sincere Get Satisfaction customers and responded to that request to participate. Wouldn’t it be great if you could send them that kind of message — and then see how they respond?

We’ve been working on the backbone of a system that helps customers invite companies to Get Satisfaction. We’re coming up with some interesting ways to find the people in large organizations who are most open to our ideas behind customer service. That’s the key part, I think. Reaching the right people, as opposed to spamming everyone and hoping the message gets through to someone.

However our system ends up working on the technical side, we’ll need to write the invitation language. We spend a lot of time crafting and framing our language because we believe it’s extremely important. We’re constantly joking and making fun of the really bad examples of language we uncover in customer service correspondence. It’s not too much of a stretch to believe that everyone else does that, too, is it? Everyone hates that faux-formal verbiage, that “your call is important to us” language.

We’ve yet to wet our pen on this invitation language, and we may not have to. We may have already uncovered a template we can borrow. A Get Satisfaction user has created his own excellent call to action for companies.

He posted it in the Target section of Get Satisfaction:

Open Invitation to Target Corporation

I’m writing to inform you that a small group of Target customers have banded together at GetSatisfaction.com, a customer-driven website that aims at directly communicating with businesses and companies. Target is among other great companies like Google, Pandora, YouTube, and more.

As a former Target employee, I think this is a great opportunity for Target to directly work with customers to resolve complaints as well as broadcast news, ideas, and information to interested Target customers.

Please, take a moment to visit about what I and other Target shoppers have to say about YOU.

Nicely done, sir. You’re definitely a Get Satisfaction superstar. You’re reaffirming our beliefs about our goals. And, as a former Target employee, you’re exactly the kind of person we want to reach: informed, helpful, understanding of the importance of customer engagement, and someone with an inside voice on the subject.

Thanks for passing it on to the company. We’ll do our best to amplify your voice — and help others do the same.

“We Are Keeping Netflix Profiles”. So reads the title of the e-mail communciation that Netflix users are getting in their e-mail in-boxes today.

This is clearly a well-deserved victory for all the Netflix customers who banded together to voice their outrage at the plan to cancel the popular feature, which lets household members set up and manage separate online queues for their DVDs.

Kudos to everyone who participated in this near-boycott, especially the folks on Get Satisfaction who helped spread the word. This is a powerful affirmation of the power of customer opinion. It smacked down the attempt by Netflix PR man Steve Swasey to make the issue go away. His insistence that taking away the Profiles feature was a “final decision” has been proven wrong.

Let’s celebrate with a movie! Now, what to pick?

Netflix has suddenly decided to eliminate their very popular “Profiles” feature. Many families use this feature to set up separate profiles for each family member. It’s a convenient way for each person in a household to set up their own DVD queue. By many people’s estimation, it’s the one thing that sets Netflix apart from their arch-rival, Blockbuster.

The change won’t go into effect until September 1st, but it’s already starting a swell of outrage across the Internet. I suppose there is still time for Netflix to come clean and provide a better answer than this one:

Why? While it may be disappointing to see this feature go away, this change will help us to continue to improve the Netflix website for all our customers.

That’s not much of an explanation. Okay, let’s be frank: It’s not in any way an explanation. How will taking away this service “improve” things for customers?

The discussion on Get Satisfaction started rolling tonight, and it’s building. In a matter of hours, a topic started on our site has grown quickly, and my guess is that it will keep on growing until Netflix’s customers can get a suitable explanation or response from the company.

When we see customer interest or outrage that explodes like this, we work to get the company connected so they can respond. That’s not always possible, particularly when the company in question hasn’t yet joined Get Satisfaction. I have attempted to contact Netflix in the past, but they haven’t been responsive to me. I’m going to put my head down and reach out to them again. And I encourage everyone else to do the same.

What’s your opinion about the Profiles feature on Netflix? Love it? Never used it? Can’t understand why it would be taken away? Weigh in and let’s reach out and get some answers from the folks at Netflix.

[Netflix is on Get Satisfaction.]

You’ve all seen the “I Hate” Web sites out there, right? I Hate Microsoft, Wal-Mart Blows, I Hate Starbucks?

They’re all fun for, like, ten seconds. Once you realize that their cries for retail justice are essentially occurring in a vacuum, with no engagement or even acknowledgement by the companies being hated, you move on. Boring.

Complaint sites are similar. They also try to harness the ire of customers to make companies step up and take notice, but, again, what company representative would dare step foot in an atmosphere like that? It’s a veritable digital lynching waiting to happen. Obviously, we’re trying to find a middle ground here at Get Satisfaction, a place where both companies and customers feel comfortable expressing their love, hate, and everything in between.

But, I confess: That unadulterated hate does catch my attention sometimes.

I was recently clued into a great example of a scrappy upstart using the power of hate in a very novel and smart way. Less Accounting, a company that offers a dead-simple accounting Web application, has created a mini-site that simply consists of a stream of Twitter tweets about Quickbooks. It’s called We All Hate Quickbooks.

Notice this Web site’s name. As is the case with most well-thought-out matters of presentation, the framing is important. It’s not the angry “I” of typical company-hate sites, nor is it the royal “we” which pretends to speak for everyone. It’s we, as in “we the people” who broadcast our thoughts and feelings on Twitter. Less Accounting has put themselves a bit on the sidelines (alongside the viewer) as we all watch the tweet-stream flow by. As they say: “We’re showing the good with the bad, so decide for yourself!”

Brilliant idea, and cleverly executed. They’re not creating any of this content. It exists somewhere on the Internet. It’s simply what people are talking about: good, bad, what have you. They’re just aggregating it. We do something similar with our Overheard feature, which allows you to see what people are saying about your company on Twitter.

The target of this piece of marketing cleverness is Intuit, the maker of Quickbooks. Intuit has long had a vocal minority of customers who haven’t been happy with all aspects of Quickbooks; for example, Mac users. For many years, Intuit has been slow to update the Mac version of its software. Sometimes, a year or more has gone by before new features that were written for the Windows version finally show up in the Mac version. Sometimes, they never show up in the Mac version. Those disaffected customers are exactly the type of people Less Accounting wants to appeal to, and I applaud their approach. It’s scrappy and smart and, well, even a little bit fun. (One quick glance at the site, and you quickly see that the rivalry they’re setting up is more of a playful one.)

But, watch out Less Accounting. Intuit probably has someone who also monitors Twitter and the Internet for mention of Intuit’s many products and services. One of them may have even just signed up to represent Intuit on Get Satisfaction, like, yesterday.

Competition is good, yes? Let’s keep it friendly, you scrappy accountants.

[Intuit and Less Everything are both on Get Satisfaction.]

“Great product, customer service sucks! Sucks! SUCKS!”

How’d you like to stumble upon a conversation about your company that reads like that?

That’s how some company representatives learn about Get Satisfaction. While searching for info about their products online, they see a big complainer. Sometimes, you just can’t resist clicking through to read a good rant. I know I can’t. But it’s no fun when it’s a rant about you.

At that point, you’ve got two choices: Ignore it (and hope it goes away), or engage. Since it probably won’t be going away anytime soon — it’s going to be up there in Google search for a long time — you’d probably be well-advised to get involved in the conversation. Even if you don’t change their mind, you can at least show them that you’re listening.

I believe they call that validation. Whether complaints are legitimate or not, whether you have a way to fix it or not, you’ll always move the conversation forward by validating a complaint with some kind of positive response. That’s the hardest part of customer service, the killing-them-with-kindness part. But, you’d be surprised at how people respond. Many big complainers come back with a surprisingly contrite attitude.

Case in point: Lane, our president at Get Satisfaction, unexpectedly invited everyone from his GMail account to join him on LinkedIn. He felt like the “invite” interface on LinkedIn had deceived him. So he complained mightily on Get Satisfaction. Sure enough, the folks from LinkedIn saw his complaint and jumped right in to respond and try to find a way to fix the problem. They even said, “Thank you very much for posting this feedback.”

Lane responded: “Well, now I just feel like a jerk. :) Steve and Adam, thanks for being so responsive to my issue. First off, let me apologize for overreacting….”

And so it often goes. Not always, but much more than I ever expect to see.

I share this little customer service parable because we have a new company rep on our site who could perhaps use a little validation of his own. He’s jumped onto Get Satisfaction to represent his company, TomTom.

I’ve done my own complaining in the past about GPS device makers and how they seem to be disproportionately represented on Get Satisfaction with a wealth of unhappy customers chiming in, but no company employees brave enough to get in there and make a difference. My attempts at reaching out to these GPS companies have not been successful, but perhaps it’s because I wasn’t reaching the right people.

Since joining Get Satisfaction a few weeks ago, this GPS rep has gone in and responded to numerous complaints, some many moons old. Give him a pat on the back — or a fresh complaint — if you get a chance. I’m hoping he can change the minds of angry GPS owners; or at the very least, show them that their complaints are being heard.

Here’s to not sucking.

[LinkedIn and TomTom are both on Get Satisfaction.]

Today is a watershed day at Get Satisfaction. We banned our first user.

One of the core jobs we see ourselves as having at Get Satisfaction is helping companies who use our site develop smarter approaches to community management. We want to help define and shape the ideas growing up around community management, and we spend a lot of time thinking about how to deal with difficult community management issues, particularly ones that are often swept under the rug. In a typical forum, for example, a company will quietly delete a user it doesn’t like. We’re not fond of that approach. Since we’re dedicated to doing things differently — with openness and transparency — we’re going talk a little bit about why we’re banning our first user.

While we’ve had numerous trolls and griefers and, well, possibly crazy people on our site, we’ve always rolled up our sleeves and tried to find new ways to encourage and reshape conversations. We’ve been successful at that, partly because the vast majority of people on our site are here to solve specific problems. Our goal is to do everything we can to avoid lowering the “ban hammer.” However, we’ve come to the conclusion that sometimes there is simply not a way to deal with a member of the community who insists on constantly and consistently harassing other community members.

And when (I hear some of you positing this in your mind already) do we determine when the line has been crossed? When does a person pass beyond being a meddlesome, troublesome troll and into the ban-hammer hall of shame? I’ll be honest and say that this is an extremely difficult question, but it’s one to which we’ve given a lot of thought.

Here are a few things that got our first user banned:

• Clear (and multiple) violations of our community guidelines
• A continued pattern of harassment of company employees
• Numerous dismissals of our attempts at changing the discourse
• Complaints about the user from other customers — complaints to company employees who are engaged in helping customers and complaints to us at Get Satisfaction

Beyond all of that (which certainly is enough), we were also persuaded by employees of the company, who, after many months of attacks and derision, sent us this message: “On a near daily basis, we have support staff who are growing frustrated with being personally bashed before we even get a chance to reply to other customers.” When dedicated employees of companies who choose to use our site — and who continually do a great job of helping their customers — start complaining that they can’t even respond to their customers without being attacked by a troll, something has gone wrong.

My own personal opinion about trolls and banning: One of the biggest challenges facing online communities is anonymity. This particular person used anonymity as a calling card and a weapon wherever possible. While we can all quickly agree that there are numerous situations where masks are preferred and even necessary, it’s hard to deny that anonymity can be a casting call for bad actors. While we don’t insist that everyone on Get Satisfaction use their real name, we do want to create a space where trusted relationships will flourish. Anonymous members who insist that they don’t have to play nice, who consistently refuse to respect the rest of the community, and who go to great lengths to stir up grief simply won’t be allowed to bring the conversation to a halt. We’ve seen plenty of forums where anonymity degrades and descends into anarchy, and that’s not an option for us. We owe it to our customer communities to make sure that doesn’t happen.

Which is not to say that there isn’t room for dissent and customer dissatisfaction. Indeed, there is. We’re all for customers standing up and making companies come clean about deficiencies in their products and services. But, as we’ve articulated in our Customer-Company Pact , a consistently adversarial tone will only get you so far. If you’re truly interested in productive ends, you’ll get farther and accomplish more if you act with at least a modicum of understanding and cooperation, especially if the company is willing to meet you half-way. 

We’ve put our ban hammer back into its case, and we’ll be replacing the glass that we broke. Our hope is that we won’t have to break it out again anytime soon, and that — when we do — we’ll expend the same amount of thought and consideration in our decision. We feel that we’ve reached a stage in the development of Get Satisfaction where the consequence of inaction against trolls and bad actors actually validates bad behavior. We don’t want to imply that this is okay, and we’re going to continue to be vigilant about other users who our community flags as troublesome, and keep stepping up to the challenges that come with shaping great communities.

A diaper bag. They asked Timbuk2 for it. Repeatedly.

The first diaper-bag query started eight months ago, and since then, there have been a lot of new conversations on Get Satisfaction imploring Timbuk2 to cater to the mommy (and daddy) crowd.

Should Timbuk2 branch away from the messenger bag market? Over the past few years, they appear to have made their brand even stronger by getting back to the basics. And that means messenger bags. This strategy has been very successful. Their customer community has grown to include tons of new customers. But some of those new customers apparently want a diaper bag.

Obviously, you don’t want to lose your legacy customers. Then again, some of Timbuk2’s legacy customers may fall into the used to be a bike messenger category. Surely some of them now identify solidly with the raising a little bike messenger demographic. They want diaper bags, too.

I’m not sure if Timbuk2 resisted the idea of making a diaper bag. But, they definitely did think about diaper bags in the last eight months. At one point, one of their employees even offered up her own Diaper Bag Hack Kit, a how-to for turning a regular Timbuk2 bag into a baby-accessory tote bag. Perfect gift for a baby shower.

The clamor from their customers apparently made a difference. Last week, Timbuk2 gave a sneak peek at their diaper-bag prototype. Yep, they’re building it.

But watch out, Timbuk2. As of yesterday, you’ve got a new request from your customers. A doggie bag.

Woof.