July 15, 2009

Introducing Get Satisfaction 2.0: A New Take on Customer Community

It’s not very often that we use version numbers for our software releases, for the simple reason that we’re unveiling improvements all the time (it’s the Web after all). Today, however, we’re launching an update so significant that we’re smacking a big 2.0 sticker on it. It’s a huge leap forward, building on what people love about Get Satisfaction while integrating the tremendous learning and feedback we’ve had since launching our service almost two years ago. Perhaps most importantly, this is a new frame for customer community that will support the many improvements and feature releases coming in the months ahead.

Get Satisfaction is about harnessing the social web to improve online customer support, and with this release we’re raising the bar in just about every way.

A Social Support Hub – Organizations may communicate in an increasing number of ways, and Get Satisfaction now provides a unified hub for connecting customers to the right people, wherever they are. The community may be emerging as the center of customer communications, but it’s intimately linked to distributed conversations on Twitter & Facebook, official channels like email and phone, or even Get Satisfaction partners like Zendesk, the popular helpdesk software. Get Satisfaction ties it all together.

Simplicity itself – Get Satisfaction 2.0 refreshes the user interface to enhance usability and present content in simple, easy-to-digest ways. Its never been easier to search, browse or interact, encouraging participation from a wider range of people.

Curated Views – Based on our structured convers ations we’re excited to announce a new feature, Content Auto-Curation. By leveraging the natural activity of your community we’re now presenting useful sets of topics, things like frequently asked questions, common problems, popular ideas and many more. The hidden value of conversations is unlocked for the first time.

Focus on results – Get Satisfaction has always focused on helping reach their desired outcomes, whether that was an answer, a solved problem, an idea implemented as a new feature or product. Get Satisfaction 2.0 highlights which topics need input from the community, and prominently features answers and answerers.

Customer-to-customer help – This new release puts a new emphasis on customers connecting with each other to answer questions and solve problems. Through positive participation, every user can now earn reputation (and possibly win the coveted Champions status) within the community.

Customizable, Configurable Widget Toolkit – We’re famous for allowing organizations to embed community through their products and web sites via our widgets. Get Satisfaction 2.0 includes a new premium widget toolkit: now you can fully configure and customize four different kinds of widgets that make plugging community content into your site as easy as cut-and-paste. Filter suggested content, auto-tag new topics, customize the look-and-feel and more.

Choose your own participation level – Not all organizations use Get Satisfaction in the same way–some don’t use it at all while their customers do. This release includes a new feature that allows an organization to set its participation level and a personal message to users, in order to set the right expectations about how its relationship to the Get Satisfaction community.

And those are just a few of the highlights. For details check out our in depth overview of Get Satisfaction 2.0. Do let us know what you think!

By Thor Muller | Posted in Satisfaction, news | Comments (12)
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)
March 21, 2008

We’re #1! Twice!

We’ve won a couple of awards this week we’re pretty proud of, at two different startup-oriented conferences down in the south bay.

On Tuesday, we presented at the Dow Jones Web Ventures 2008 conference, and we just learned we were chosen as one of their top ten startups out of the full list of 70.

This sits nicely on the mantelpiece next to the audience pick for “Best of Show” we got yesterday, for our song and dance at the Under the Radar conference put on by Dealmaker Media, which Eric mentioned in his earlier post.

How sweet is that? To celebrate we ordered pizza and took silly photos of ourselves.

Just a little bragging here on a Friday afternoon. Enjoy the weekend, everybody!

By Lane Becker | Posted in appearances, company, news | Comments (1)
February 28, 2008

BusinessWeek Tackles Customer Service

“Love the Customers Who Hate You.” That’s the title of the lead article in the new issue of BusinessWeek, as part of their “Customer Service Champs” special section.

We can definitely get behind that idea. I always chuckle when I hear Thor express something similar around the Get Satisfaction office: “Start a love affair with your customers.” It’s an award-winning idea, and one that people like, perhaps because it feels as if there’s a very big paradox buried somewhere in that phrase.

After reading the section, I have to say, “Great job, Jena McGregor,” management editor at BusinessWeek. We were happy to be one of the sources for this feature section. They bent our ear about emerging customer service trends, and it turned out to be a very good read. As we saw during our recent Customer Service is the New Marketing convention, there’s a major trend going on that’s reshaping customer service, and we’re definitely excited to see a magazine put together a high-caliber focus to the subject.

The theme behind this feature section is consumer vigilantism. Like the recent story about Get Satisfaction in the New York Times, the editors of BusinessWeek start with an idea that will draw readers in — customers complaining — and then provide some more depth.

There are a few highlights that caught my attention.

First, there’s an interesting story about customer vigilantes that calls out the Comcast Must Die blog (which we also wrote about previously) as an extreme example of customers using the Internet as a channel to demand better customer service from corporations.

There’s also an article about GetHuman.com and the dwindling prospects of their site becoming an ongoing resource for customers looking to get around phone trees.

Then, there’s my favorite article: the one where we’re mentioned. That one is a story about the plight of the Better Business Bureau and how it’s trying to leverage its brand and reputation — while at the same time trying to become a place where people go to get product reviews. That sounds like a very tall order.

And, who doesn’t love a good list? Readers definitely do. BusinessWeek put together a list of the top 50 companies in their customer satisfaction survey.

You can read the whole thing online here.

[BusinessWeek is on Get Satisfaction.]

By Eric Suesz | Posted in Satisfaction, customer service, news | Comments (0)
January 17, 2008

This Old Blog

This blog — Demand Satisfaction! — is ready for an extreme makeover.

We’re going to rip out the musty old verbiage that’s been rotting under the weight of time’s obesity, scoop out the puns and cliches that have built up in the underbelly of the PHP, and hang a wall of solid earnestness with an embossed fleur de lys pattern imported from a specialty shop in Prague.

Then, we’re going to paint it pink. Or teal. We haven’t decided yet.

Along with this new look, we’ll be changing the content. We won’t be taking away anything you’ve seen already. Rather, we’ll be adding a wealth of new content that’s specifically focused on consumer advocacy.

Why? Because there’s always room for more consumer advocacy in this world. In fact — in case you haven’t noticed — the deck is still stacked surprisingly high on the side of the table where the corporate players pretend that they’re only able to answer Frequently Asked Questions. We’re going to keep working at balancing out that equation — to transform the nameless and faceless corporate voices into real people with an ear cocked toward your ideas and concerns. We’ve accomplished a lot since going live nearly four months ago, and we’re pumped up about the next year and beyond. We can’t promise that we’ll fix every problem you have, but we’ll give it a damn good shot.

One key thing we’ll be doing with this blog: hooking in and displaying Get Satisfaction questions, problems, and ideas that are directly related to the topics we’re covering on the blog. This marriage between the Get Satisfaction Web site and the Demand Satisfaction blog will allow us to spotlight the funny conversations, the telling examples of companies behaving badly, and the success stories of forward-thinking organizations that are rising to the challenge of providing excellent customer service.

Dishing out consumer-focused information is essential to our core mission, and we’re stoked about this blog renovation. As we develop the new look over the next few weeks, if there’s an issue you want to see us cover, a behemoth of a problem that needs exposing, or a wrong you want righted, send us your suggestions, tips, and big ideas to editor [at] getsatisfaction [dot] com. We’ll blog about it, and we’ll push it as high into the consciousness of the Internet world as possible, so you can get the answers you’re seeking.

And, of course, we expect you to demand satisfaction from us, while we work at bringing satisfaction to you.

By Eric Suesz | Posted in Satisfaction, appearances, customer service, design, news | Comments (0)