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)
July 22, 2008

New Feature: Image Uploads

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Computers are complicated. So is software. User interface glitches, buttons that don’t work, menus that are misleading — all of that is hard to explain with mere words when you are trying to get help from a company. Sometimes, it’s just easier to show them what you’re seeing on your screen. It’s easier for both customers and company employees. Win-win, as they say. So we’ve added image upload.

It’s pretty straightforward. When you’re posting a topic or reply, just click on “Add an image” and upload what you got to show. We’ll upload it and insert the image in-line in your topic or reply. You can also insert an image URL and point to an image that already exists somewhere online if that’s what you prefer. It’s a feature we’ve wanted to add for awhile, and we’re happy to say that it’s now ready to go.

If you’re a Mac user and want to improve the way you take screen shots — and annotate them — you have to try out Skitch. It’s pretty awesome. We’re all big fans of it in the Get Satisfaction office, and we use it every day to share thoughts, ideas, and detail what we’re seeing on our computers. Five minutes with this application, and you’ll quickly see how it can benefit you, even without digging into the advanced features.

Skitch or no Skitch, we hope that having the ability to show everyone else what you’re seeing will make using Get Satisfaction easier and more efficient.

By Eric Suesz | Posted in Satisfaction, appearances, delight, design, development | Comments (1)
July 10, 2008

Redesign! New Company Home Page

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The development rolls on at Get Satisfaction.

This time, we’ve updated the company home page. If you’ve got a problem with a company, that’s where you’ll likely end up: on that company’s Get Satisfaction home page. So what will you do when you get there?

Previously, the page was focused on exploration. We wanted you to get into the existing topics and look around. The new version is focused on getting answers. Our main goal with this redesign was to give this page a clear focus on starting a topic. We also wanted to give you the ability to easily scan existing topics.

Key to that quick search for answers is the big box right under the company’s name. Start typing, and we’ll look for topics that match. It’s a search box, but it’s also the start of your new topic — if you don’t end up finding a topic that satisfies you.

As always, it’s not just about questions. Problems, ideas, and discussions are still here, and they are more clearly called out as distinctively different. We feel that each topic type almost has its own personality, and we plan on calling that kind of distinctiveness out even more in the future. For now, the four topic types are available to choose from right away, and you can switch between them (and when you search, we search everything, not just “ideas”, for example).

We also added subsections as tabs: “People”, which displays the employees of the company, “Products & Services”, which displays all the products and services the company offers (plus related ones), and “Overheard”, which is, of course, that nifty way of seeing what people are saying about the company on Twitter.

Finally, the topics in the list below the big search box have clear chunks of information that make it easy to scan. And, we show more of them. Each one includes the avatar of the person who started the topic, as well as the name and avatar of the last person to reply to the topic.

Want to sort those topics? Go for it! We’ve added a way for you to pull out the most active, most popular, most recent, and unanswered topics. You can also filter by topic type. So, for example, you can quickly find the most popular ideas in a company’s space.

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Those are the basics of the new page. We have a bunch of other details baked in there, but I won’t go on about them. Go give it a look-see — and, as always, let us know what you think.

By Eric Suesz | Posted in Satisfaction, design, development | Comments (3)
June 26, 2008

Wish List

Attention companies: Whatcha want?

We’re working on our big suite of company tools right now. We’ve got a long list of things to build, and we’re prioritizing that list. Before we get too far into it, though, we’d like to hear what you’d like to see.

What kind of data do you want from our system? What’s valuable to you? What kind of numbers would you like to get out of Get Satisfaction? Aim high, and we’ll see if we can accomplish it.

Join Lane’s new topic and give us some feedback.

By Eric Suesz | Posted in Satisfaction, development | Comments (6)
May 22, 2008

Two Big Releases: ‘Help Center’ & ‘Overheard’

We’ve been working extra hard on two big product releases. So much so that we’ve hardly even picked up our Rock Band instruments. The neighbors have had a respite from the noise, but now that we’ve pushed it all live, we’re ready to rock again.

We’re extremely proud and excited about these two new things we’ve created. Here’s the scoop:

Help Center

There’s a key detail about what we’re doing at Get Satisfaction that is sometimes hard to make shine through: We’re not trying to build a place where companies and customers are compelled to come to resolve their differences. That is, we’re not trying to capture people and keep them here. What we’re ultimately focused on is increasing the connections between companies and their customers. And that can happen anywhere. In fact, for best results, it should be happening in as many places as possible.

In that spirit, we’ve created the Get Satisfaction Help Center. It’s a PHP installation you can download and drop right onto your own Web site. It’s as easy as setting up a blog, and it allows you to push and pull all of the data from Get Satisfaction in a seamless way. Simply put: It’s our site on your site.

Here are a few examples already up and running: Joby, makers of the Gorillapod, Skitch, and a highly modified version for MyBlogLog. You can also see a default installation running for our own section of Get Satisfaction.

Since Help Center is based on PHP (surely the Web’s most popular programming language), it’s easy to install and customize. We offer some very pretty templates you can use, but we also encourage you to adapt it to your own site’s look and feel. After all, you’ve probably spent countless hours honing your company’s visual style. Go get it now and make it yours. Let us know if you have any questions right here in Get Satisfaction.

Also, a side note to developers. Help Center is actually an open source application hosted on Google Code under the MIT license, so if one of your modifications really rocks, you can share it back with everybody else!

Overheard

Ever wished you could respond to what people are saying about your company anywhere they’re saying it? Of course you do. I bet you wouldn’t mind chiming in about what people are saying about other companies, too, huh?

To help fulfill that need, we’ve added the Overheard feature. It’s a way for people to monitor and extend the conversations going on around companies and their products. Yep, we’ve got tons of that going on already on Get Satisfaction, but these conversations are from Twitter. That’s right: Twitter. You’ve probably noticed that Twitter is quickly becoming more than just a way to send shout-outs to your friends. It’s transforming into a primary attention stream.

Overheard tracks Twitter conversations — “tweets” — that mention a specific company or its products and displays them in a list. If you see a tweet that you think would needs an in-depth response or would make a great topic on Get Satisfaction, turn that tweet into a Get Satisfaction topic with a click. Anyone on Get Satisfaction can do this, and we ping the user on Twitter to let them know that we’ve started a new topic based on their tweet. It’s a great way to locate conversations going on out there in the wild and provide rich, archived (i.e. searchable) responses on the Get Satisfaction network. Combine this with Help Center, and companies are now able to bring distributed Web conversations into their everyday operations, improving their customer service and fostering retention.

If this idea of tracking mentions on Twitter isn’t something you’ve considered before, you might find that it’s a superb way to not only find out what people are saying about a company and its products, but also to connect with people you otherwise wouldn’t be able to reach. If you’re an admin for your company, you can even set additional keywords and tune this Twitter stream.

Go check it out for companies like Ebay, Comcast, Google, even the US Government. We think you’ll be surprised at just how neat it is.

By Eric Suesz | Posted in Satisfaction, applications, design, development, innovation, open source | Comments (4)