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!

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:

• Venturebeat’s coverage
• The official press release
• Wendy’s personal blog announcement

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!

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.

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.

We’re not just Internet famous. We’re Apple famous. (Take that, fake Bigfoot.)

The folks at Apple called us up some months ago wanting to find out what we do and how we do it. They were looking for all-Mac organizations to profile on their Web site. How could we say no?

We’re definitely an all-Mac operation at Get Satisfaction. Everyone here drank the Apple Kool-Aid a long time ago. We all proudly sport Mac laptops, we all have iPhones, and we’ve developed everything at Get Satisfaction using Apple technology. It’s almost comical when a phone rings (or even vibrates) in our office. Everyone immediately reaches for their iPhone. I think we need to institute a mandatory “unique ringtone” policy. Seriously.

The Apple people came to our office a few times and interviewed each one of us and took a ton of pictures. (We hid the one PC laptop we keep around for testing purposes.) Sadly, they didn’t decide to use the picture of me looking all cool and casual with my feet up on my desk as the big, glossy face of Get Satisfaction. I think I squinted too much that day. The pictures they did include are quite good, and the words that accompany the pictures sound great to our ears.

Thanks, Apple, for including us on the business-facing section of your site as an example of a scrappy start-up full of people who live and breath Macs. We’re honored.

Read all about it right here.

This week, Twitter got a big boost in traffic to its Web site from an ABC News Story that showed how an everyday consumer got help from Comcast’s Frank Eliason on Twitter (we’ve written about similar things on this blog in the past). I’ve gone ahead and coined a silly phrase for this kind of outreach: “micro-service”. Thank me later.

All that mainstream-media-led traffic inevitably led to additional traffic to Get Satisfaction, and we were inundated with a wealth of people who had a lot to complain about, but who hadn’t ever used Twitter or Get Satisfaction before. Unexpected events like this are always a great way to see how well we’re framing our service. If they don’t get it, perhaps we aren’t explaining it well enough.

I’m seeing a lot of stories like this ABC News story popping up. Reporters are trying to find a way to write about Twitter, and they seem to want to frame the story in a particular way. More stories like these are surely coming, and most of them will probably be following up on the same Comcast/Twitter story that’s already been written by other, more astute journalists.

I wouldn’t mind seeing stories about Twitter that focus less on complaints. There’s so much more to Twitter. Tons more. When they frame the story as “how to complain and get a company’s attention” rather than “look at all this unexpected interestingness that comes out of new ways of communicating,” I don’t know that they’re accomplishing much — beyond prompting the big complainers to reach out and rant to someone.

Not that I’m complaining too loudly myself. They’re reporting on customer service. That’s a start. More please! I’m ready to direct the traffic.

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.

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.

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.

“We Are Keeping Netflix Profiles”. So reads the title of the e-mail communciation that Netflix users are getting in their e-mail in-boxes today.

This is clearly a well-deserved victory for all the Netflix customers who banded together to voice their outrage at the plan to cancel the popular feature, which lets household members set up and manage separate online queues for their DVDs.

Kudos to everyone who participated in this near-boycott, especially the folks on Get Satisfaction who helped spread the word. This is a powerful affirmation of the power of customer opinion. It smacked down the attempt by Netflix PR man Steve Swasey to make the issue go away. His insistence that taking away the Profiles feature was a “final decision” has been proven wrong.

Let’s celebrate with a movie! Now, what to pick?