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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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.

Every once in a while, I read a blog post that really gets it right. When that happens, I feel compelled to share it with people. I don’t do that very often because I hate blogs that do nothing but point people to other blogs. But, this one is worth it. [Full disclosure: We're mentioned, but that's not why you should read it.]

It’s about community management, and it’s one of those “10 Things” blog posts. But, it’s not the typical Digg-friendly titled list of obvious truths. It’s from Next New Networks, and it’s a compilation of a list that came out of a workshop they did with Micki Krimmel. If you’re interested in community management, I suggest you give it a quick read.

My favorite line: “People put something on their blogs because it says something about them, not because they want to promote a product they like. Think about that one for a while.”

I’m still thinking about that one. Thanks for making me think.

“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.]

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.

Tony Hsieh opened up our Customer Service is the New Marketing Summit with a compelling statement: “We’re a customer service company. We just happen to sell shoes. Twenty years from now, hopefully people won’t even remember that we sell shoes.”

That’s a strong statement from the CEO of a pretty strong company: Zappos. You may not know it, but they’re not in the shoe business. Having effortlessly bought — and effortlessly returned — many pairs of shoes from and to them, I’m inclined to agree with him. They ooze customer service.

To help us foster and encourage the kind of spirit that Tony believes in, we’ve introduced the “Company-Customer Pact,” a simple, usable framework for company-customer interaction.

The provisional draft of this document is now available at CCPact.com. We’re actively seeking community support, as well as public comments on this document. Support and comments can be voiced right on the wiki pages. Having your voice included would be terrific.

Please forward this post to folks that you’d like to hear in this conversation — or anyone you think would be interested in building better company-customer relationships.

That probably explains why I’m not freaked out about the stock market’s downward spiral this week; why I nod off when dinner conversation turns to options, commodities, and splits; and why I am still stuck renting a tiny, overpriced apartment in one of the most expensive places on Earth. I’m a financial idiot.

Luckily, there are bloggers like Trent Hamm who can dumb it down for financial nit-wits like me. Trent’s blog, The Simple Dollar, strays into customer service territory today, and he’s put forward one of the best common-sense explanations of customer service that I’ve heard in quite awhile by asking himself this question whenever he is considering purchasing an item: “What would be the implications in my life if it ceases to function and there’s no customer service available?”

Unfortunately, he’s come to the conclusion that “good customer service is like an insurance policy.” It’s a shame to hear it said that way, but I have a hard time disagreeing with him.

Notably great experiences are punctuated by a moment of “wow,” when the product or service delights, anticipates the needs of, or pleasantly surprises a customer. OXO’s Good Grips Angled Measuring Cup triggers such a moment of wow. A set of angled markings on the OXO cup lets you quickly measure liquids for recipes without having to stop cooking and bend over. Suddenly a little part of your life is easier, because OXO thought carefully about the way you cook. This delightful surprise resonates because it feels tailored to your needs.

This essay resonates with the work we’re doing, because it speaks to those moments where companies genuinely interact with their customers — not as numbers in a spreadsheet or tables in a CRM database but as people with thoughts, concerns, feelings, and most importantly, a need for surprise, empathy, and delight.

With Satisfaction, we’re working to build a tool, a service, and an experience that allows companies to find ways to make these delightful moments more regular, more repeatable, more enticing — more “wow,” really. And longer-term, our goal is to create ways for companies that succeed in producing those wow moments to derive the maximum amount of value from them. We’re developing tools to help companies translate the effect of these wow moments into internally valuable and quantifiable benefits — not just increased sales, but also cost savings, marketing outreach, market research, future product development, and any other touchpoints we can find where consumer affection and joy can be funneled back into a company’s bottom line.

So customers are happy, because they get regular moments of surprise and delight from the companies and products they care about, and companies are happy because they’ve maximized the internal benefit of that experiential response, guaranteeing that they’re going to want to provide it again and again. Everybody wins!

The essay is well worth reading in its entirety. And best of all, the closest Brandon gets to mentioning Apple is the iPod+Nike sports kit — no small feat when you’ve got as big and obvious an example as the entire iPod ecosystem (with its wildly dedicated fan base) looming right there in front of you.

Zachary tries to manufacture controversy by pitting “elitists” such as Thomas P. Hughes (”New technologies are becoming so complex that many are beyond the possibility of democracy playing a role in their development”) against new schoolers like Eric Wilhelm of Instructables (”If innovation isn’t tailored to [customers], they expect to be able to tailor it to themselves”). But where’s the conflict? The iPhone is a phenomenon that is Apple doing what Apple is best at (i.e. elite design), but there are thousands of developers hacking away at its hardware, operating system and applications. And as Eric von Hippel (the MIT evangelist for user-led innovation) would point out, this is where most democratic contributions are made, at the edges of the maker’s business. If history is a guide, we can expect some of these apps and hacks from users to end up influencing Apple engineers or being integrated wholesale into its products.

Many of us are attracted to this notion of ivory tower-based innovation, but it’s largely mythical. Many of us know that Thomas Edison, the original icon of the elite genius generating invention after brilliant invention, owed much of his success to raw opportunism and the willingness to crush superior technologies that threatened his business. The technology his famed Menlo Park lab produced often relied on the work of outsiders, usually mavericks and hobbyists. For instance, Edison famously took credit for the early motion picture projector known as the Vitascope, which had been invented by a couple of kids trying to distinguish themselves in trade school.

And Apple, that most singular modern epicenter of technology innovation, owes much of its success to the innovations that came from outside its hallowed walls. The early Mac was a refined set of innovations from Xerox Parc and Douglas Englebart (with design help from folks like my alma mater, Frogdesign). The resurgence of the Mac with OS X is due in part to the fact that it’s based on freeBSD, an open source UNIX system built with contributions from many scattered developers.

And the iPod, the iPod! Not at all the pure creation of isolated genius within the company that Zachary implies in his article. The iPod chip came from PortalPlayer, its interface designed in part by third-party firm Pixo, and even the iPod name was coined by a freelance copywriter.

But one thing’s for certain. Apple will never be able to farm out its MacWorld keynote presentations. There are some things that only Steve Jobs can do.

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