June 3, 2008

Sucking It Up

“Great product, customer service sucks! Sucks! SUCKS!”

How’d you like to stumble upon a conversation about your company that reads like that?

That’s how some company representatives learn about Get Satisfaction. While searching for info about their products online, they see a big complainer. Sometimes, you just can’t resist clicking through to read a good rant. I know I can’t. But it’s no fun when it’s a rant about you.

At that point, you’ve got two choices: Ignore it (and hope it goes away), or engage. Since it probably won’t be going away anytime soon — it’s going to be up there in Google search for a long time — you’d probably be well-advised to get involved in the conversation. Even if you don’t change their mind, you can at least show them that you’re listening.

I believe they call that validation. Whether complaints are legitimate or not, whether you have a way to fix it or not, you’ll always move the conversation forward by validating a complaint with some kind of positive response. That’s the hardest part of customer service, the killing-them-with-kindness part. But, you’d be surprised at how people respond. Many big complainers come back with a surprisingly contrite attitude.

Case in point: Lane, our president at Get Satisfaction, unexpectedly invited everyone from his GMail account to join him on LinkedIn. He felt like the “invite” interface on LinkedIn had deceived him. So he complained mightily on Get Satisfaction. Sure enough, the folks from LinkedIn saw his complaint and jumped right in to respond and try to find a way to fix the problem. They even said, “Thank you very much for posting this feedback.”

Lane responded: “Well, now I just feel like a jerk. :) Steve and Adam, thanks for being so responsive to my issue. First off, let me apologize for overreacting….”

And so it often goes. Not always, but much more than I ever expect to see.

I share this little customer service parable because we have a new company rep on our site who could perhaps use a little validation of his own. He’s jumped onto Get Satisfaction to represent his company, TomTom.

I’ve done my own complaining in the past about GPS device makers and how they seem to be disproportionately represented on Get Satisfaction with a wealth of unhappy customers chiming in, but no company employees brave enough to get in there and make a difference. My attempts at reaching out to these GPS companies have not been successful, but perhaps it’s because I wasn’t reaching the right people.

Since joining Get Satisfaction a few weeks ago, this GPS rep has gone in and responded to numerous complaints, some many moons old. Give him a pat on the back — or a fresh complaint — if you get a chance. I’m hoping he can change the minds of angry GPS owners; or at the very least, show them that their complaints are being heard.

Here’s to not sucking.

[LinkedIn and TomTom are both on Get Satisfaction.]

By Eric Suesz | Posted in customer service, hospitality, reputation, Satisfaction | Comments (2)
May 22, 2008

Two Big Releases: ‘Help Center’ & ‘Overheard’

We’ve been working extra hard on two big product releases. So much so that we’ve hardly even picked up our Rock Band instruments. The neighbors have had a respite from the noise, but now that we’ve pushed it all live, we’re ready to rock again.

We’re extremely proud and excited about these two new things we’ve created. Here’s the scoop:

Help Center

There’s a key detail about what we’re doing at Get Satisfaction that is sometimes hard to make shine through: We’re not trying to build a place where companies and customers are compelled to come to resolve their differences. That is, we’re not trying to capture people and keep them here. What we’re ultimately focused on is increasing the connections between companies and their customers. And that can happen anywhere. In fact, for best results, it should be happening in as many places as possible.

In that spirit, we’ve created the Get Satisfaction Help Center. It’s a PHP installation you can download and drop right onto your own Web site. It’s as easy as setting up a blog, and it allows you to push and pull all of the data from Get Satisfaction in a seamless way. Simply put: It’s our site on your site.

Here are a few examples already up and running: Joby, makers of the Gorillapod, Skitch, and a highly modified version for MyBlogLog. You can also see a default installation running for our own section of Get Satisfaction.

Since Help Center is based on PHP (surely the Web’s most popular programming language), it’s easy to install and customize. We offer some very pretty templates you can use, but we also encourage you to adapt it to your own site’s look and feel. After all, you’ve probably spent countless hours honing your company’s visual style. Go get it now and make it yours. Let us know if you have any questions right here in Get Satisfaction.

Also, a side note to developers. Help Center is actually an open source application hosted on Google Code under the MIT license, so if one of your modifications really rocks, you can share it back with everybody else!

Overheard

Ever wished you could respond to what people are saying about your company anywhere they’re saying it? Of course you do. I bet you wouldn’t mind chiming in about what people are saying about other companies, too, huh?

To help fulfill that need, we’ve added the Overheard feature. It’s a way for people to monitor and extend the conversations going on around companies and their products. Yep, we’ve got tons of that going on already on Get Satisfaction, but these conversations are from Twitter. That’s right: Twitter. You’ve probably noticed that Twitter is quickly becoming more than just a way to send shout-outs to your friends. It’s transforming into a primary attention stream.

Overheard tracks Twitter conversations — “tweets” — that mention a specific company or its products and displays them in a list. If you see a tweet that you think would needs an in-depth response or would make a great topic on Get Satisfaction, turn that tweet into a Get Satisfaction topic with a click. Anyone on Get Satisfaction can do this, and we ping the user on Twitter to let them know that we’ve started a new topic based on their tweet. It’s a great way to locate conversations going on out there in the wild and provide rich, archived (i.e. searchable) responses on the Get Satisfaction network. Combine this with Help Center, and companies are now able to bring distributed Web conversations into their everyday operations, improving their customer service and fostering retention.

If this idea of tracking mentions on Twitter isn’t something you’ve considered before, you might find that it’s a superb way to not only find out what people are saying about a company and its products, but also to connect with people you otherwise wouldn’t be able to reach. If you’re an admin for your company, you can even set additional keywords and tune this Twitter stream.

Go check it out for companies like Ebay, Comcast, Google, even the US Government. We think you’ll be surprised at just how neat it is.

By Eric Suesz | Posted in open source, design, development, applications, innovation, Satisfaction | Comments (4)
May 2, 2008

3, 2, 1… Contacts!

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If you’ve spent any amount of time on social networking web sites, you’ve probably experienced a moment like this:

Hey, this site is pretty cool. Invite my friends? Okay. I know that my buddy Jimmy Pop will dig it, for sure. Let’s see, just enter your e-mail address. There’s the Submit button — Wait a second! Did I just spam everyone in my GMail???

Whether by accident or by design, many social networking sites have a confusing way of getting people to invite other people into the system. As we’ve been working on adding Contacts — other customers in the Get Satisfaction system who you may want to follow or refer to on a regular basis — we’ve made it our goal to avoid the pitfalls that many other sites have fallen into. We want to make sure you know what each “next step” in an invite process will be before you click that button.

So, give it a shot. Add some Contacts from your dashboard.

Tip: If you’re a Twitter or Flickr member, start by importing those. It’s lickety-split fast.

Feedback: We think we’ve gotten pretty close to what we envisioned when we started designing this new feature, but if you have any advice, kudos, or complaints, share them with us.

By Eric Suesz | Posted in design, development, Satisfaction | Comments (2)
May 1, 2008

Comcast Cares. No, Really.

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Comcast, who hasn’t exactly had a great public image in the last few years, appears to be slowly changing that.

When Comcast showed up on Get Satisfaction, they had a lot of complainers. Hell hath no fury like an Internet junkie scorned. Boy, there were some angry folks.

But then, someone from Comcast stepped in and said, we hear you and we’d like to help make it better. And they keep on saying that.

If you haven’t read about him, Frank Eliason is the man at Comcast who seems to be spearheading this new approach. He swoops in on conversations on Get Satisfaction and offers to help fix problems. Plus, he’s set up a Twitter account (follow him!) as an additional way to monitor and respond to Comcast customers who are broadcasting their cable and Internet frustrations on Twitter.

That Twitter/Get Satisfaction combo seems to be working pretty well, as evidenced by this conclusion from a Get Satisfaction user today:

Wow, I stepped out for two hours and by the time I got back I had 3 voicemails from Comcast — from Corporate HQ in Philadelphia, from the California Executive office, from the local office here. An hour later I had the Comcast tech out here, he removed the trap outside, on the street just as I expected, then phoned in to close my order and enable the boxes again. I’m all settled now.

Learnings:

- Get Satisfaction works. Publicity is powerful.
- Comcast listens, kudos to them (including @comcastcares on Twitter)
- The execs and techs involved in such elevated customer care are doing a wonderful job, but it’s like putting out lots of little fires. I think at one point it will rise to the level that will convince Comcast to invest more ( a LOT more) in training their support troops so that there would not be fires to put out in the first place.
- Oh, have I mentioned that Get Satisfaction works? :-)

After reading that today, I feel like I need to give a tip of the Get Satisfaction community manager’s hat to Frank Eliason for pushing for the kind of consumer change that everyone wants and needs. Keep it up, and I bet you’ll be seeing more customer outbursts like that one.

By Eric Suesz | Posted in customer service, community, reputation, Satisfaction, delight | Comments (0)
April 29, 2008

Fast Company Article

Woo-hoo! We just got a write-up in Fast Company.

When you’re the one being written about, it’s easy to spot particular places in articles where you think journalists have gotten it wrong. You might say, “Well, that’s not exactly what I said,” or, “The author is just trying to spin this to fit the headline.” There’s a million ways to pick apart an article, and the only one who usually thinks they got it right is the one who wrote it.

But, everyone in the office seems to agree that Kermit Pattison did a really great job with this one. And we love the headline: “Does a New Website Hold the Secret to Great Customer Service?”

Give it a read.

By Eric Suesz | Posted in Satisfaction, press | Comments (1)