In case you arent familiar with GetSatisfaction, its a hub for customer support for startups and big corporations alike. Users can post comments, share ideas, criticize and provide any sort of feedback to a company. Most of the startups – companies have employees that respond to the user feedback, resulting in higher customer satisfaction.
GetSatisfaction has seen widespread adoption and the fact that companies like Apple, BBC, Adobe etc use the service serves as a testament to how mainstream the service has become.
However, I still dont understand why companies use GetSatisfaction. The way I see GetSatisfaction, its just a morphed version of a forum. Why do these companies really need to use GetSatisfaction to connect with their customers and provide support ? Why cant they implement the same on their websites ? The functionality that GetSatisfaction provides is not hard to implement. If they need to rely on a 3rd party service to close the feedback loop with their customers, I’d say that’s a serious problem.
Am I missing something ?
Do you use GetSatisfaction for your startup / company ? If so, can you tell me why ? Why havent you tried to provide similar ability for customers to connect with you directly via your website ?
we r running GS and i think most imp thing is that it gives a transparency – all problems, questions etc are public and hence keeps us on our toes to get to them resolved. Besides the javascript tab is ultra-cool. user does not have to leave a page.
how would it be different in terms of transparency if you’d host a similar service / feedback loop on your own site ? If you host it yourself and arent being transparent, then you’re just masking a serious customer satisfaction issue — which may impact you pretty bad later.
the JS tab shouldnt be too hard to get going, should it ?
there is always a “perception” problem.. third party sites are more transparent because you can delete posts made on your site.. can;t do that in third party’s site..
If a company is deleting posts made by customers on its own site, then they’re shooting themselves in the foot.
deleting the post will not make the problem go away. you have an unsatisfied customer – its imp that you make him happy.
if a company wants, they can be transparent on their own site itself – in fact thats an opportunity for a company to make a customer to a loyal convert — by excelling in customer service / support.
I visited the site and found a lot of questions unanswered…what a satisfaction!!!…lol
I think the question is of creating and maintaining a community. Getsatisfaction is doing that and having to create such a huge community on its own site is difficult for any company. Also, it looks like in this case the companies are going where the users already are … which is not so bad in my opinion.
Apple’s user forums are pretty popular and so not all companies are moving to getsatisfaction.
probably. But I’m still not convinced. If you are a startup and you want to focus your energy on your core offering, GS provides a good solution so that you dont have to spend time doing it yourself.
however, for companies that have resources, why cant you offer intuitive solutions for engaging the customer on the site itself ?