Demand Satisfaction!

October 21, 2009

The partnership brings together two customer-centric organizations focused on integrating public user communities with internal CRM support systems.

San Francisco, Calif., October 21, 2009 — Get Satisfaction, the popular Web 2.0 platform that’s transforming customer support with community and crowd-sourcing, today announced a partnership with CustomWare, an Australian company specialized in developing collaborative technologies for enterprises. The partnership brings together two customer-centric organizations focused on integrating public user communities with internal CRM support systems.

The pair’s first mission is to create a Salesforce AppExchange application that will give Salesforce users a new way to harness the social Web. Already in limited release, the new application will allow Salesforce customer service agents to quickly search topics and create cases from Get Satisfaction, from a single point.

Designed to improve online customer service and business velocity, the integrated application will be launched at the upcoming Salesforce Dreamforce conference this November in San Francisco. A free demo will be made available for Salesforce customers to test the application’s merits for themselves.

Rob Castaneda, CEO of CustomWare and Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year 2009 finalist, said, “Thousands of brand communities made up of millions of members have gathered on Get Satisfaction to publicly share their experiences with products and services. This collective voice has already won the attention of thousands of organizations around the world. The CustomWare and Get Satisfaction partnership will add a practical and powerful dimension to this community CRM. Companies already invested in enterprise CRM systems, like Salesforce, will have a single point from which they can monitor, engage, and manage their customers.”

Known for its integration of wikis, blogs, and social software into all manner of enterprise systems, CustomWare is behind solutions for over 300 customers from 30 countries, including Sony, Johnson & Johnson, Cisco, World Vision, Atlassian, and Polycom.

Get Satisfaction’s Web 2.0 customer service and support platform launched in 2007 and has grown exponentially. More than 26,000 company communities have been created on Get Satisfaction, and upwards of 17,000 organizations are actively engaging with 1.4 million community members. Organizations of all stripes — from Nike to Dell — engage in relationships with their customers, increasing loyalty, retention, collaboration, and customer-driven innovation, while reducing repetitive support costs.

About Get Satisfaction

Get Satisfaction is revolutionizing customer service by applying the principles of crowd-sourcing and community to the customer-service experience. Companies who use the Get Satisfaction social CRM platform significantly reduce support costs while increasing customer satisfaction, retention, and loyalty. How? By providing an authentic, engaged, and thriving customer support community. Join the conversation at http://getsatisfaction.com

About CustomWare

CustomWare builds the applications and connectors that make different business systems, the software or social type, talk to one another. It makes life so much easier for the customer and the business and really accelerates processes. You can ask our clients, including Johnson & Johnson, Sony & Cisco, Atlassian, and Polycom. Our high-tech skills and straight-talking approach has made our business attractive to clients of all types and sizes in over 30 countries. http://www.customware.net

Do you like awesomeness, especially as it applies to making products that make customers happy? I’m going to go out on a limb and say that you do. If so, there’s an event you may not be familiar with that’s happening this weekend, which you should attend. It’s LessConf 2009, and it’s being held in Jacksonville, Florida.

LessConf is organized by the folks who make Less Accounting, an online accounting app for small-business owners to help them manage their money. They’re focused on making very simple, very approachable Web applications that nearly anyone can use to make life — and work — more efficient. Their goal: Make everything less complicated, less formal, less confusing. “Less Everything” — that’s the name of their company.

What I love most about them is their scrappy, DIY, don’t-just-dream-it-but-do-it-this-weekend-in-your-spare-time attitude. I am a lover of the informal and the creative and a hater of all things that tell us that unproven ideas are better left on the drawing board until enough people agree to form a committee. These guys throw that kind of restriction out the window and challenge themselves, and others, to adopt a strategy of no restrictions. It’s “Just do it” taken to another level.

If you are in Florida this weekend — or can be — spend your Saturday with a group of people who are at the forefront of ideas that make consumers happy. It’s affordable, informal, and bound to be tons of fun. I bet you’ll even learn a thing or two about how to please customers. To please you, their customer for this event, they’re even offering free massages. For real. Sign up here.

Here’s a wonderfully creative promo video they made to get the word out. Even if you can’t attend the event, you’ll find something to borrow from this gem: