For starters, there’s a little mantra we have at Get Satisfaction: the more we empower customers the more that good companies thrive. It seems to us like this idea is taking off in a big way. Smart organizations are now jumping at the chance to give their customers a loud voice in their affairs, and help connect them with each other to spark new kinds of social value around their products. We’re thrilled to be partnering with so many of them in this effort.

At the same time, some of the most productive customer communities are those where the company is only marginally involved, or isn’t involved at all. Famously independent communities like TivoCommunity and Mini2 have been as productive and beneficial to their associated brands as any company-sponsored community. Apple products have spawned dozens of unofficial communities in addition to its official one. Over and over we’ve seen that engaged customers can be as capable as organizations at forging meaningful connections around the products they love. Everyday, people are transforming organizations from the outside-in.

Because of this, we reject the false choice between people-powered customer support and company-centered support. In fact, we see them as two sides of the same coin.

Once upon a time, branding meant maintaining control over all the places that customers interact with it, whether that was the telephone, Web, print, or events. If the brand sponsored an online community it was with the overriding concern of preserving a “safe brand experience.” This necessarily meant corporate censorship, and it meant the forum was so marginalized even people inside the company might not know it existed.

But the world looks a lot different today. Companies as diverse as Comcast, H&R Block, Whole Foods, Timbuk2 and countless smaller companies are building their brands by engaging outside of the safety zone. Organizations are increasingly going to where their customers are, to services like Twitter, Facebook and yes, Get Satisfaction. Heck, it’s so prevalent I even get Twitter replies from the San Francisco Zoo staff when i take my kids there. We’re seeing the emergence of community spaces and tools that serve the *relationships* between people inside and outside of the company, where each side has the tools and the accountability to do right by each other. This may once have been an overly idealistic notion, but it is fantastically with us today, and it is changing the world.

…

Still, there aren’t many businesses that are exactly parallel to Get Satisfaction. The service is a hybrid of consumer social networking and business software-as-a-service. As a result, people can sometimes draw the wrong conclusions about how it works. Here’s a brief Q&A:

Q. Why is Get Satisfaction creating all these community spaces around other brands?
A. The vast majority are added by employees of these organizations, and the rest are added by customers themselves in the course of seeking a way to be heard and get support results. An upcoming version of each community overview page will actually link to the person who added the organization to GS. We do not add organizations to the system in bulk.

Q. Are organizations coerced into participating? What if they already have a community or support site?
A. They are under no obligation or duress to participate. In fact, we give every organization free tools to point visitors to their preferred support channels, as well as set a featured message of their choice to any users that visit the site. In addition, we no longer display advertising on any of our free support community pages.

Q. Can organizations remove themselves completely from GS?
A. They may request a removal if there are no customer interactions, but we allow users to add it back if they wish to establish customer-to-customer community. We’re rolling out a feature that will allow a company to state clearly that they have “opted out” of participating, so they will not be contacted by us again.

Q. GS Community pages often appear above the organization’s own web site in Google search results. Isn’t this brand hijacking?
A. While we’re proud that search engines rank our pages highly, we have no direct control over the position that our pages appear. More importantly, we have absolutely no desire to create confusion in the minds of users. We are continually refining our design and copy to be clearer and more effective at expressing the purpose of our site, and our relationship to the organizations people are discussing. We’re open to feedback on this, too: drop us a note.

As always, the best way to get to the top of Google is to do a good job being a member of the web community, having clear, concise, and well-architected web pages, and supporting your users to the best of your ability.

Q. Do you contact organizations when they’ve been added by a customer?
A. We sometimes will reach out to organizations that have a lot of activity around them. However, thanks to Google Alerts and other buzz monitoring tools employees usually discover the activity before we have the chance to connect. One problem with reaching out to companies is that many of them do not publish contact details, and the ones they do publish do not always lead to a response. It’s this fact that often drives people to express themselves on Get Satisfaction. We help customers and organizations meet in the middle!

That wraps up Get Satisfaction 101. We are always on, and eager to hear from you. Make your comment below or op on over to our community and let us know what you think. That’s what it’s all about.

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The good folks at ReadWriteWeb quickly noticed that the new service behaves an awful lot like Get Satisfaction. Aww shucks! We’re really flattered … but more important, we’re happy for all the users who are going to get great support from the new system.

If I try to do some mind reading for a moment, I have a feeling that the scalability-obsessed GoogleBot realized two things:

1. No matter how often you update your FAQs, or how well your search algorithm works, the machine can’t always answer users’ questions. It’s a “long-tail” problem, with the tail being defined by how rapidly the knowledge base needs to change.

2. Forums (or Google Groups, in this case) are just too uncontrollable and chaotic to effectively crowd-source customer support, and the answers — if they are there — are just too hard to find. It’s a structural problem that can’t be solved without an “outcomes orientation” built into the system.

These are problems that Get Satisfaction began solving more than a year ago, so here’s the part where we shamelessly market ourselves: If you have a company that wants to provide high-touch, highly scalable customer support while keeping costs low — then be like Google and use our service.

It’s great to see the Googlers jumping on the customer-service bandwagon!

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.

Satisfaction is a neutral party in all this: our goal is to help customers and companies communicate better with one another. In most cases this just means providing a better platform for everyone to talk. In this Facebook issue, we’ve gone a step further by stirring the pot on behalf of the frustrated users, culminating in a heads up I sent to TechCrunch.

This isn’t because we think the company’s basic policies are wrong. In all likelihood they’re in the best interest of their core community, and we’re all for enforcing standards of behavior in online communities. We do it all the time here. However, we are and will always be tireless in advocating for open communication between companies and their customers because this is how long-term, trusted relationships are built. In this case, Facebook’s “opaqueness,” as TechCrunch describes it, is creating real alienation amongst users. We think there’s a lesson here for all companies.

We’re not so naive that we think that a company like Facebook can or should reveal everything about its internal systems, nor discuss private issues regarding individual accounts out in the open. But by reinforcing the image of itself as an impenetrable fortress, where all communication is allowed only on its terms, Facebook sends the message that it’s afraid of its own users. Now granted, some of its users may in fact be dangerous (and we’ve met a few that fit that bill, certainly), but for the rest of us who are investing in Facebook with our time we should expect more. Facebook should be speaking to us in a human voice, tell us where they’re coming from, listen attentively when we want to share, and sometimes engage with us on our terms. Because businesses depend on the goodwill of their users to make things work, they need us to build their business.

The goodhearted, hardworking customer service team at Facebook doesn’t deserve to be villainized for doing what it takes to keep their delicate business running smoothly. But it is time that companies recognize that there are hard costs incurred when they choose to only present a closed, institutional public face.

How much more productive would it be if Facebook posted a response in Satisfaction that helps people understand the company’s actions better? Perhaps something like this:

“Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to share their experiences here. It helps those of us here at Facebook to understand how we can do a better job, and we are deeply sorry when we make mistakes that inconvenience our users. Please know that we’re working overtime to protect the fun, safe environment that we’re known for. Consequently, when it comes to our terms of use we generally err on the side of enforcement, but we are careful to review each case if users appeal the action (by sending a note to appeals@facebook.com). This can take some time, of course, and we appreciate your patience if you find yourself in this position. We have every interest in getting non-offending users back into their accounts as quickly as possible.

Finally, we will try harder to communicate more frequently here about the ongoing changes we’re making to improve your experience. Even if things don’t always work perfectly we’re committed to working with you over time to make Facebook all it can be. Once again, thanks for caring enough to express yourself about Facebook!”

In the meantime, we here at Satisfaction continue to welcome Facebook’s participation in the discussion.

I’ve had three really remarkable customer service experiences this past month. The companies could have refused me service saying that it was simply my mistake: Losing my wallet, showing up for a concert on the wrong day and an application error that led to a misprint on a business card. Instead they did something better.

In all three cases the companies responded with information, help, and forgiveness. A Zipcar employee helped me get back my lost wallet and then even asked me if there was anything else he could do. When I tried to exchange tickets at a concert, Doug behind the desk, helped me understand why it wasn’t possible (even though he really wanted to) and how to make sure I’d have that option the next time. MOO Cards reprinted new cards with no questions asked, no returns required and at no charge.

I know that working on a customer service application makes me more aware of…well…customer service, but it’s also making me more aware of the cases of exemplary service. In the past I only noticed the bad examples. Nowadays, those good examples stand out because I can see what principles are guiding the actions that lead to great experiences. I can connect the dots.

Too often we’re just left frustrated with bad experiences. It can be hard to explain why it was so bad or how it can be better. Hopefully we can stop saying “that sucked” and start saying “that would have been better if they had shared more information” or “that would have been better if they had tried to understand my intentions”. We can change customer service if we have a direction.

It’s my hope that the principles of the conversation-centric approach to customer service enabled by Satisfaction will extend back out to the offline world. Unlike the cold efficiency of the phone tree which seems to have rubbed off on so many in-store service departments, Satisfaction might have a positive transformative effect online AND offline. A return to humanity in customer service through the influence of an online example. This is the kind of web app I’m excited to be building.

-Leslie

When most people say customer service, what they’re really talking about is customer support. And customer support — those tedious minutes (or hours) spent listening to muzak while on hold with the phone company, or standing in line waiting to return something at a department store, or that email from the overnight shipping company explaining that the package was somehow mysteriously lost — is for the most part all the contact we have with the companies we do business with.

As Thor pointed out in his post on “Why Customer Service is the New Marketing,” companies often see customer service as an after-the-fact cost center — a post-sale, one-way transaction. And when that’s the case, it’s true that customer service does end up cast in a supporting role. But now we have the Web, and the Web is all about two-way communication. With the expanded voice the Internet affords people through blog posts, pod- and videocasts, discussion forums, even simple commenting, there’s a huge opportunity for companies and customers to expand the definition of “customer service” to include a whole lot more of the conversation going on around the things they sell.

When “customer service” goes two-way, it becomes about a whole lot more than just support. It becomes:

• Community. Customers have a lot to say not just to companies but also to each other, and when companies pay attention they can learn a lot from what gets said. There’s a whole range of conversations people have about the things they use and love, and it’s much bigger than just the subset that’s directed to the company. Or to put it a little differently: you wouldn’t call up Levi’s to ask if you look good in a pair of their jeans, but you probably wouldn’t hesitate to ask your friend the same question. The Web can make everybody that friend.

  Companies create community when they encourage customers to interact with each other, facilitiating those conversations and participating where it makes sense. If you run a company that wants to connect with your customers in this way, recognize that your products and your customers have a life beyond their interactions with you and find ways to make that part of the culture of your organization.

• Evangelism. When a company pays attention to the conversations its customers are having online, it quickly becomes clear which customers stand out as the most knowledgeable, the most helpful, the most committed, and the most passionate. Companies, these are your best customers. They care about what you make and do and have made you a part of their identity. Reach out to them! Find ways to connect with them and reward them for their participation — in other words, harness that enthusiasm to the benefit of all concerned. This really is the new marketing, because these customers are ground zero for genuine word-of-mouth promotion of your stuff.
• Co-creation. Questions and problems are the standard currency of customer support, and there’s no doubt those are important, but there’s more to two-way customer service than just providing answers. People have ideas, too — ways that they use products that most companies could never have imagined. They mold them, change them, bend them, occasionally break them — in other words, use them as the basis for every kind of unpredictable invention.

  Seeing what customers do with their products freaks some companies out, but it shouldn’t, because this is customers telling companies what they want the company’s products to become. If you’re a company into the new marketing, you know that the more you embrace this approach, the better your business. Give customers the opportunity, and they’ll tell you what they want you to sell them! Find ways to bake customer co-creation into the development process for all or part of your product, as Jones Soda has done with the labels on its soda bottles, Fluevog has done with the design of some of its shoes, and Threadless has done with its entire business model. You’ll find that your customers become that much more communicative, evangelical, and committed to seeing you succeed, because now your success is their success, too.

The story tells of how 30Boxes, an infectious social calendar app, abandoned conventional wisdom in their pursuit of extraordinary customer service. It’s a prime example of how embracing chaos can energize a business. (It was originally told to me by Nick Wilder of 30Boxes on my Customer Service is the New Marketing panel)

The Trouble with Trouble Tickets
Nick, along with serial entrepreneurs Narendra Rocherolle and Julie Davidson, started another company a few years ago, the photo-sharing site Webshots, ultimately acquired by CNET. As Webshots’ customer base and support issues began to scale up they did what every proper technology startup does; they installed trouble-ticket software to respond to all the customer issues. They anointed staff as official reps, established a process that worked with the software, and began to answer customers in this ostensibly optimal workflow.

Here’s the first plot twist: they discovered that almost fifty percent of the support issues coming in through that system went unresolved. Consistently. The remainder of the issues were sheperded through this siloed system by the staff, but were rarely viewed by the product developers or managers. Even with this efficiency-focused software, devoted support personnel, and the best of intentions Webshots was unable to rise to the goal of decent customer service.

Closing Issues by Opening Conversations
When the team launched their new startup, 30 Boxes, they decided to try something different. They opted out of trouble ticket systems altogether. Instead, they set up a forum. Just an old-fashioned discussion board, albeit one with a pretty, minimalist design. They didn’t publish an email form, and avoided any of those trumpeted CRM applications we read so much about. It was just a standard open source forum that anyone could post to.

This time the results were dramatically different. Right away users began to post questions, bugs, product ideas, company praise, and whatever else was on their minds. All this interaction from customers and the company was public, not hidden away in a private database like before, and each day the vibrant interactions pulled even more users into the conversation. All this hubbub created interest and involvement, stoking the passions of the customer community.

Now here’s the second plot twist: Instead of half of customer issues withering away unresolved in a trouble ticket system, on the 30Boxes forum almost 50% of customer issues were resolved by other users! Of the remaining issues, the vast majority were handled quickly by the 30Boxes product team which monitors the forum closely, not as their job, but because they’re eager for user feedback. And the biggest pain point of any customer service system–answering the same questions over and over again–mostly vanished now that all answers were posted publicly instead of sent to a private email inbox.

Just like magic.

New Rule: Wherever you can, keep your conversations with customers public

“Don’t send bloggers stuff that makes you look like an asshat. They tend to blog about it.”

It all started when an out-of-work man and his wife, Katherine Coble, were intimidated and manipulated by a job search company called JL Kirk and Associates. Katherine describes how the company lures unemployed folk into their offices and uses high pressure sales tactics to squeeze money out of them, in exchange for “representing” them to potential employers. It sounds to me like a terrible deal–job-seekers are asked to shell out thousands of non-refundable dollars up front to *maybe* get some job leads.

Katherine blogged their bad experience, and her post quickly appeared at the top of Google’s search results for JL Kirk. Being so publicly unmasked must have freaked out JL Kirk, as bad press would scare any of us. But as we keep demonstrating on this blog, the ways in which a company engages with disgruntled customers makes all the difference in the world.

JL Kirk went the Darth Vader route. They had their lawyer, King & Ballow, send a fearsome letter demanding she “take down the blog entry…together with entire thread of comments.” They accused her of defamation and “tortuous interference,” and threatened her with monetary damages if she doesn’t comply with their demands by April 13. Confronted by a pissed off customer, their instinct was to actually crank up, WAY UP, the intimidation that Katherine had already described.

This was rocket fuel on a campfire. Within a few hours there were dozens of blog posts amplifying and repeating the whole scenario, including this one by superstar blogger Instapundit. Several others have mirrored her blog posts. The original post, already the seventh most prominent link on a Google search for the company, and referencing articles will likely grow far more visible thanks to all the incoming links and repetition. I’m happy to pile on, because this brutish attempt to shut down a person’s freedom of expression is an attack on all of us. It’s worth pointing out that the EFF, one of our favorite non-profits, exists to help combat just this kind of abuse.

Ironically, they’ve undermined their own ability to smother this issue. As Bill Hobbs writes: “The entire contents of the original post and all subsequent posts have become items of news interest…That’s not good news for King & Ballow or JL Kirk Associates because it means that I and the rest of the world’s 71 million bloggers are perfectly free to republish them in their entirety in the course of reporting on this story.”

It’s sad to see this behavior on a day when I had an overwhelmingly positive customer experience on this blog. Mere hours after describing an accidentally offensive automated email from Geni, an uber-cool genealogy app, the company had responded apologetically. They saw my public airing of the misfire as an opportunity to show they cared enough about my experience to reply personally. Now that’s a company that gets it.

It goes without saying that JL Kirk and Associates is a member of the Hall of Shame.

Of course, this flies in the face of conventional wisdom for an e-commerce company. After all, customer calls are one of the biggest enemies of ye olde profit margin. In fact, the standard call center thesis may well be “every interaction is a cost to be avoided.” Why would any smart businessperson actually encourage customers to get in touch?

But this is just the beginning for Zappos. Because really, lots of companies display a support number, even if they don’t advertise it like a clearance sale. It’s usually just an invitation to phone tree hell. At Zappos, if you call you’re in for a surprise…starting with zero wait time. More importantly, you’re going to have a warm, personal conversation with someone who knows the finer details of the giant catalog of products. Many customers who’ve been through it say the experience is unlike anything they’ve experienced outside of a family run boutique.

How do they do it? They start by banning all scripts, the building block of a more traditional call center. Because Zappos knows that if they forced their service reps to live by a script they implicitly distrust them to operate without one. Zappos service is anything but automated. As their tagline puts it, they are “Powered by Service.” This commitment means letting their front-line people use their good judgement and–gasp!–their genuine personalities to engage with customers. Phone staff can do and say whatever they need to in the process of delivering satisfaction, whether that means giving away free overnight shipping or reading site content out loud to sight impaired customers.

They elevate the role of customer service to something so valuable that every manager in the company must participate:

…Every new employee that we hire in our corporate office is required to go through 4 weeks of Customer Loyalty training (answering phones in our call center) before starting the actual job that he/she was actually hired for. To us, customer service isn’t just a department — it is the entire company.

Given the incredible leeway they extend to their staff, it’s no wonder that Zappos avoids all the traditional metrics for success. The most important of these metrics is time per call, a number that by the sheer fact of its collection would undermine the mandate to do “whatever it takes” to woo people at all stages of customerhood. Zappos management opts instead for trust, occasionally listening in on calls, but generally focused on the broader measurement of satisfaction (98% positive according to BizRate) and return business.

The result is that Zappos is creating some of the most passionate customers of any online retailer. These customers are incredibly vocal, and the company’s projected 2007 annual sales of $800 million can be credited largely to the word-of-mouth their amazing service inspires. This earns them a seat of honor in our Hall of Fame.

Zappos reminds us that companies that embrace customer interactions create evangelists for their cause. It’s not that reaching this coveted place where engagement and passionate fervor meet is so hard or expensive–it may in fact be the cheaper and easier path in the long run. But as we’ve seen, it does require relinquishing control to the chaos of real human interactions. That is revolution for most companies.

This works even better with everyday customer interactions. When I eat out at restaurants I like to ask the wait staff about their favorite dish on the menu. I can often predict the quality of a meal based on the strength of the waiter’s opinions. A good restaurant will give its staff lots of opportunities to sample its food. It wants its servers to know not just the culinary factoids about tonight’s unpronouncably gourmet dish, but also how it tastes, its mouth feel, what else it’s like. Not just which wine should be paired with the dish, but why.

And I’m far more likely to trust a waiter, and the restaurant by extension, if he also talks about what he doesn’t like. Though it is counter-intuitive, it gives me real comfort when I order to know that some dishes aren’t as good as others. Similarly, I spend more money at clothing stores where the salesclerk tells me when something’s not looking so hot on me. I trust them when they give me the thumbs up on something else.

Now think about the customer service interactions that fail–insurance companies, phone companies, PC-makers. These are organizations that have no place for opinions, nor the passionate involvement of their staffs. They actually provide scripts designed to protect against such things.

As people we share opinions when we genuinely care–care about the subject we’re discussing and those we’re sharing with. So it’s natural that the wait staff at great restaurants tend to be foodies themselves. Successful boutique workers are fashionistas. We can see that being opinionated is ultimately tied to who we are. We can’t fake it, at least very well. That’s what makes being opinionated so special, and why it’s today’s New Rule.