Demand Satisfaction!

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)

November 18, 2008

Flattery Will Get You Everywhere

Earlier this month, Google announced a revamp of their help forums.

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!

By dscotthirsch | Posted in Satisfaction, Uncategorized, innovation, new rules, web 2.0 | Comments (0)

August 26, 2008

We’re Hiring

Attention people of the Earth: We seek a Ruby developer.

If you follow this blog, or have spent time on our Web site, you are surely aware of what we’re up to: building a complex, large-scale, consumer-focused Web service that’s well thought out — and as elegant as we can possibly make it.

If you’re a developer, you can probably spot Ruby a mile away. If you’re not a developer, but you know what we mean when we say “Ruby”, you may know someone who might be interested. Let ‘em know that your favorite start-up is in the market for a Ruby superstar.

You can find out more details (or forward everything along to that awesome Ruby developer you know) right here on our Web site.

That is all. Continue about your business.

By Eric Suesz | Posted in Satisfaction, jobs | Comments (0)

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.