Customer service, Get Satisfaction

Mark Gibbs' Web site tips, plus network applications news headlines

Last week here in the Network World Web Applications Alert newsletter I discussed some key issues that drive successful customer service and mentioned Get Satisfaction, a Web application that provides an outsourced customer service platform.

Get Satisfaction provides a forum-based service infrastructure for companies or products that is really easy to create and manage; in fact, much easier than almost anything you could do as an in-house project.

A crucial issue is that you don't have to be from the company that the forum is about; anyone can create a forum for anything! This has interesting implications for companies that don't have a coordinated, comprehensive customer service strategy if they happen to have an angry or disillusioned user community – the PR consequences of unhappy users finding a common forum could be a big problem if not addressed.

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Last week here in the Network World Web Applications Alert newsletter I discussed some key issues that drive successful customer service and mentioned Get Satisfaction, a Web application that provides an outsourced customer service platform.

Get Satisfaction provides a forum-based service infrastructure for companies or products that is really easy to create and manage; in fact, much easier than almost anything you could do as an in-house project.

A crucial issue is that you don't have to be from the company that the forum is about; anyone can create a forum for anything! This has interesting implications for companies that don't have a coordinated, comprehensive customer service strategy if they happen to have an angry or disillusioned user community – the PR consequences of unhappy users finding a common forum could be a big problem if not addressed.

As a registered user you can track products and companies that interest you, contribute to forums by asking questions and making product suggestions, and share your comments on Facebook, Twitter, by e-mail, and through other social networking services.

The comment process for contributions allows users to categorize their input as a question, an idea, a problem or as praise. Users can add tags and assign a smiley face to their comment which provides an instant sentiment gauge when the company or other users scan a forum.

Get Satisfaction does something brilliant in the user comment creation process; they assess and report on how likely the comment is to get noticed based on whether tags are used, whether a smiley is used, whether the length of the comment is long enough, and whether the comment is titled. This is great because it encourages users to be more engaged and relevant.

If you are an employee of a company represented on Get Satisfaction you can claim your company and become a recognized moderator. Free forums related to a company, whether or not employees have claimed their affiliation, are considered unclaimed. For example, Apple hasn't claimed their forum which was started by users although Apple currently has 15 claimed employees monitoring it. On the other hand companies such as Zappos rely heavily on Get Satisfaction and have 83 employees registered including the CEO.

Registration for users is free and there's a free account for starting a company or product forum. The free account doesn't allow for official company representatives but does allow for identified employees and provides basic management reporting services.

Paid for accounts start at $19 per month (this adds one official rep, hosting on your own URL, and some simple customization) while the top end account option at $899 per month buys extensive customizability, analytics, integration with Zendesk, and so on.

Get Satisfaction is by far the easiest, fastest and most cost-effective way to create a customer service interface for your company and products. The company recently announced a new round of venture funding and has even been asked to the White House to discuss "leveraging technology to reduce costs, streamline processes, and improve customer service across the federal government."

Mark Gibbs is a consultant, author, journalist, columnist and blogger.