Review: Get Satisfaction
Get Satisfaction is a user generated content and community site that offers customer support for products and websites by providing a neutral space for companies and customers to connect. Users search for a product or company to find existing solutions and suggestions in effort to solve your problem. If you are unable to find your issue already resolved, you can ask a question, make suggestions, report a problem or offer praise. Other consumers and product representatives can respond to your questions and comment on your suggestions. Users can also vote on new features to raise their popularity and visibility to companies.
By centralizing the knowledge bases and support centers of many companies, consumers are able to more quickly find them and aren’t required to learn a new interface for each company they wish to investigate. The content and community are a great way to investigate the company behind the product when researching upcoming purchases.
Branded Experience
The Get Satisfaction website allows you to interact with multiple companies and products while enjoying a single interface. The vocabulary, iconography and colors are consistent throughout and collectively create a fantastic backdrop for the meat of the site: the user generated content. Using the site to get help and voice your opinion is easy and clear. It’s easy to imagine that getting just a single, but important, issue resolved using Get Satisfaction will generate considerable goodwill with the user towards the brand.
Product Innovation
Currently, the product has impressively narrow focus. They’ve managed to reduce customer service to four items that all seem to use the same versatile message thread concept: Questions, ideas, problems and praise. The site has several ways to view and add those items, but keeps the content organized in a way that new users and sponsoring company employees can manage.
The way I see it, the best innovation here is a conceptual one rather than a technical one. The value is in the neutral site that helps companies and consumers connect is a public way. That public record leverages the time and energy the company puts into answering each question. And, the consumers suggestions and concerns are leveraged into a group, which should make them more useful and prioritized for companies.
Online Application
It’s available online and free and easy to signup. It so easy to signup it even has a note above the submit button that casually reinforces this simplicity that reads, “Yep, that’s it.” The API allows companies to integrate the content and forms within their websites. And, where Get Satisfaction exploits the value on an online application is that is lets consumers piggyback on existing suggestions with their own takes and votes of agreement. The company now receives an organized thread of input instead of thousands of disconnected and un-actionable emails regarding a subject or idea.
Business Model
Monthly subscriptions charged to companies to manage their presence on the site.
Impact
Get Satisfaction is making the customer service experience more transparent so that consumers can hold companies accountable for shortcomings. Additionally, consumers are able to get together and voice their opinions about products and suggestions in a way that companies will have a hard time ignoring as the size of that group grows. Maybe one day we won’t have to wait 45 mins to talk to our phone company about our service anymore.
About Our Breakthrough Application Reviews:
Pound Interactive helps companies identify, visualize, engineer and grow breakthrough applications for the web. We define breakthroughs as game-shifting, market-creating websites and applications that empower consumers in ways unimaginable before the web.
Our process and research centers on three key areas that we believe make up breakthrough applications: product innovation, branded experiences and online applications. In this blog, we catalog and discuss breakthroughs we come across with the goal of better understanding the patterns that create breakthroughs.
