Customers are a hidden source of product specialists that corporations have been slow to tap. They usually become very knowledgeable about products they love and can often solve problems an understaffed support department doesn’t have the resources or will to solve (e.g. how to unlock an iPhone). It’s no wonder crowdsourcing your customers has become a popular and lucrative business – just see our recent coverage of PowerReviews and Bazaarvoice).
Satisfaction Unlimited is another one of the companies tapping this knowledge base by helping young companies crowdsource their support amongst their customers. They’re doing it through a network of corporate discussion boards that let customers ask questions, propose ideas, submit problems, or just chat. Satisfaction is currently powering online support for a couple notable properties (Twitter, Pownce, Slideshare) and is now opening up a public beta to even more companies. They’ve also just raised a $1.3 million round from First Round Capital, O’Reilly Alphatech Ventures, Jeff Clavier, Adaptive Path, Mike Brown, and Jason Schultz.
Satisfaction’s network consists of AJAXy bulletin boards for over 200 companies. Not all of them are “owned” by the companies they represent, but rather spots for consumers to meet each other and mull over their latest issues. The open beta will let companies come in and claim these boards so they can moderate the forum and connect with their customers.
Having a network of these help boards provides an advantage to setting up your own board since the network comes with an existing user base. Tangler’s forums system also has this advantage.
The boards themselves are very similar to Jive’s entry-level product, their enterprise knowledge base. Users can create profiles and make posts to the board. Corporate mods can surf the board to moderate and answer questions. You can also search for and follow different conversation threads by email and RSS as they unfold. While Jive offers a significant number of extra upgrades to their system, Satisfaction fits the bill for smaller businesses.
Bought this out of the petty cash fund. I don’t know what it is or what they do but it’s revolutionary!
http://fakestev...er.blogspot.com
getSatisfaction is a horrible domain name, much less one a company should use.
it’s way too long, and not pleasey-sounding.
Great… now companies will simply close all their Indian call offices and resort to customers pools building up and maintaining themselves in order to save costs. If you build a product, the least you can do is support it internally, having customers act as tech support should be seen as a failure to invest proper funding where it matters… the customers!
Jon
Hmm…I actually think this is pretty useful. It certainly is a solution for smaller companies, but has a clear value to any company that has a wide customer base and a product that’s a little quirky to support.
Lame idea.
Hi Jim! You rule!
great idea and adds to customer support. Also great for opensource products.
CONGRATS to the Satisfaction Team, who are on an noble mission = improving the experience of all customers.
I’ve outlines why I think Satisfaction is important –they’re disruptive to Marketing as we know it.
http://www.web-...porate-website/
Sounds like one of those pron sites to me.
http://fakestev...er.blogspot.com
Special Interest Groups, both online and off, have long provided end-user support for products and services. They were the backbone of the major online communities back in the 80s, including Delphi (now Delphi Forums). Delphi itself has always encouraged a members-helping-members sense of community, and it is a major reason Delphi still exists today.
Hopefully, Satisfaction’s communities will give it the strength to be around 25 years from now. There’s certainly enough need for product and service support out there…
Gordie
Delphi Forums support
Big congratulations to Thor, Amy, Lane, Cameron et al – am looking forward to working with them as this is a very important service. Customers help customers every day – some have their own wiki, some have great support groups on different services, but having a focused community site for many different products makes more sense.
It’s going to be interesting to see which support communities start to pop up first and fastest…
It will be relevant within a sliver the social media space, but ultimately is just an advancement to an open forum. I don’t see it solving anyone’s pain… with a few exceptions.
It’s funny how every time I come here the hate is just palpable.
It’s almost a lock GetSatisfaction will be a success. I’ll be fascinated to watch and see which companies have communities take root around them on their site, but for every product there are people who need more then the company’s existing support provides. GS’s UI, voice and positioning are all very well thought out, and their interest in online community, customer service and communication is quite strong.
Even better they now have Clavier, First Round and O’Reilly as advisors. Why again do you think this isn’t going to work? Wanna bet?
They should pay their crowds.
Holy crap, a crowdsource idea…I would have almost thought this idea originated at CambrianHouse…but they haven’t done any crowdsourcing, so that’d be wrong. Hope this idea works! I think it’s a good idea.
I’ll state my bias first: I’m an advisor to Satisfaction.
That said, I’m an advisor because I believe in their mission, their approach and the founding team. They’re very open to feedback, to working quickly and taking a longer view, and to considering how their product will play in the world outside the Bubbleosphere.
There are a couple facets here. The first is that infrastructure of this sort no longer needs to be run or maintained in house. Anyone can hose phpBB or punBB forums, but maintaining them, building critical awareness and growing yet another community in a small garden really isn’t worth it anymore.
Second, Satisfaction, through its approach to community building, will already be home to a growing number of tuned in and savvy consumers. This is an informed base that you want as a source of customers. Rather than trying to attract web-smart shoppers to your isolated forum or closed-off ticketing system, Satisfaction takes care of much of the leg work there, giving both companies and their customers the ability to cut to chase and over time, deliver higher quality and deeper customer service by adapting to the kinds of feedback being collected across companies and products.
Which leads to the third angle: analytics and market awareness. Again, rather than hosting forums that are marginally better than one-to-one email systems, Satisfaction, by being the semi-omnipotent overseer, is able to develop specific business intelligence for both classes of its customers: consumers and companies. By creating an open forum for feedback and discussion across products, those companies who are most involved and build the most social capital will be able to cash in on the patronage of Satisfaction users; for customer-consumers, they have the ability to post their issues publicly in view of others, to have that criticism weighed in context, and then to be offered alternative product where appropriate.
Of course much of this comes down to execution. But with Lane’s background at Adaptive Path and the rest of the team coming from Ruby Red Labs, I’m confident that they’ll be the ones to get “open customer service” right the first time.
http://bragadee...-satisfied.html