Attention companies: Whatcha want?
We’re working on our big suite of company tools right now. We’ve got a long list of things to build, and we’re prioritizing that list. Before we get too far into it, though, we’d like to hear what you’d like to see.
What kind of data do you want from our system? What’s valuable to you? What kind of numbers would you like to get out of Get Satisfaction? Aim high, and we’ll see if we can accomplish it.
Join Lane’s new topic and give us some feedback.
Netflix has suddenly decided to eliminate their very popular “Profiles” feature. Many families use this feature to set up separate profiles for each family member. It’s a convenient way for each person in a household to set up their own DVD queue. By many people’s estimation, it’s the one thing that sets Netflix apart from their arch-rival, Blockbuster.
The change won’t go into effect until September 1st, but it’s already starting a swell of outrage across the Internet. I suppose there is still time for Netflix to come clean and provide a better answer than this one:
Why? While it may be disappointing to see this feature go away, this change will help us to continue to improve the Netflix website for all our customers.
That’s not much of an explanation. Okay, let’s be frank: It’s not in any way an explanation. How will taking away this service “improve” things for customers?
The discussion on Get Satisfaction started rolling tonight, and it’s building. In a matter of hours, a topic started on our site has grown quickly, and my guess is that it will keep on growing until Netflix’s customers can get a suitable explanation or response from the company.
When we see customer interest or outrage that explodes like this, we work to get the company connected so they can respond. That’s not always possible, particularly when the company in question hasn’t yet joined Get Satisfaction. I have attempted to contact Netflix in the past, but they haven’t been responsive to me. I’m going to put my head down and reach out to them again. And I encourage everyone else to do the same.
What’s your opinion about the Profiles feature on Netflix? Love it? Never used it? Can’t understand why it would be taken away? Weigh in and let’s reach out and get some answers from the folks at Netflix.
[Netflix is on Get Satisfaction.]
You’ve all seen the “I Hate” Web sites out there, right? I Hate Microsoft, Wal-Mart Blows, I Hate Starbucks?
They’re all fun for, like, ten seconds. Once you realize that their cries for retail justice are essentially occurring in a vacuum, with no engagement or even acknowledgement by the companies being hated, you move on. Boring.
Complaint sites are similar. They also try to harness the ire of customers to make companies step up and take notice, but, again, what company representative would dare step foot in an atmosphere like that? It’s a veritable digital lynching waiting to happen. Obviously, we’re trying to find a middle ground here at Get Satisfaction, a place where both companies and customers feel comfortable expressing their love, hate, and everything in between.
But, I confess: That unadulterated hate does catch my attention sometimes.
I was recently clued into a great example of a scrappy upstart using the power of hate in a very novel and smart way. Less Accounting, a company that offers a dead-simple accounting Web application, has created a mini-site that simply consists of a stream of Twitter tweets about Quickbooks. It’s called We All Hate Quickbooks.
Notice this Web site’s name. As is the case with most well-thought-out matters of presentation, the framing is important. It’s not the angry “I” of typical company-hate sites, nor is it the royal “we” which pretends to speak for everyone. It’s we, as in “we the people” who broadcast our thoughts and feelings on Twitter. Less Accounting has put themselves a bit on the sidelines (alongside the viewer) as we all watch the tweet-stream flow by. As they say: “We’re showing the good with the bad, so decide for yourself!”
Brilliant idea, and cleverly executed. They’re not creating any of this content. It exists somewhere on the Internet. It’s simply what people are talking about: good, bad, what have you. They’re just aggregating it. We do something similar with our Overheard feature, which allows you to see what people are saying about your company on Twitter.
The target of this piece of marketing cleverness is Intuit, the maker of Quickbooks. Intuit has long had a vocal minority of customers who haven’t been happy with all aspects of Quickbooks; for example, Mac users. For many years, Intuit has been slow to update the Mac version of its software. Sometimes, a year or more has gone by before new features that were written for the Windows version finally show up in the Mac version. Sometimes, they never show up in the Mac version. Those disaffected customers are exactly the type of people Less Accounting wants to appeal to, and I applaud their approach. It’s scrappy and smart and, well, even a little bit fun. (One quick glance at the site, and you quickly see that the rivalry they’re setting up is more of a playful one.)
But, watch out Less Accounting. Intuit probably has someone who also monitors Twitter and the Internet for mention of Intuit’s many products and services. One of them may have even just signed up to represent Intuit on Get Satisfaction, like, yesterday.
Competition is good, yes? Let’s keep it friendly, you scrappy accountants.
[Intuit and Less Everything are both on Get Satisfaction.]
“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.
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.
Join us here as we chat about customer communities, the benefits of transparency, principles of hospitality, and what we're doing with Get Satisfaction.
You can also contact us anytime at info@getsatisfaction.com.
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