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Sarah Worsham

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Do your customers have satisfaction?

Knowing what people say about your company is pretty important for maintaining your brand image and quality of service. The Internet allows people to easily post opinions, problems and reviews. How do you know what people are saying about your company?

One way is to provide a forum where people can go to post reviews, problems, questions, etc. Get Satisfaction provides neutral ground for this conversation, which you can easily link to your website. Anyone can startup a conversation about a product or company, but if you own the company you can claim them (Get Satisfaction then verifies your claim). Once you’ve claimed or started a conversation, you can represent your company as an official representative or just an employee. More importantly, you can interact in an official manner with your customers and potential customers to provide your own side to any problems, questions or issues. As a customer-centric company you should take this input in order to improve your products or services and then interact with the community to get their continued feedback.

Besides linking or creating a badge to the conversation from your website, Get Satisfaction also provides the ability to add topic widgets in order to increase the visibility of your customer support conversation. These topic widgets can be customized by topic, order, number, summaries, etc. and you have have multiple widgets if you want to target different topics. Anyone can add their own customized topic widgets to their own sites – allowing your customers to increase visibility of the conversation as well. If you insist on keeping the conversation on your own website, an API is provided for integration with your site.

Conversations are organized by products, tags, questions, ideas, problems, and talk and can also be identified by recently active, latest and unanswered. Replies to the conversation can be rated by the participants so you can quickly get an idea of the overall emotion of the community to any particular idea – information that has previously been the realm of in-person focus groups.

For companies looking for a quick and easy way to interact with customers, Get Satisfaction can offer a great deal of functionality for free. However, keep in mind that the company is still in beta and hasn’t yet decided on how they will make money. Obviously without a business plan, the company may also disappear at some point – but right now, according to The NYTimes, they have comments on over 2,000 companies with 40% of the companies responding.

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CrunchBase Information
Get Satisfaction
Information provided by CrunchBase

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What is your Business Brand Awareness?

Your customers – current, potential, disgruntled, etc – are talking about you. Do you know what they are saying? Do you know where they are saying it? How do you keep negative comments from tarnishing your brand image?

In his post, Who do people trust? (It ain’t bloggers), Jeremiah, a senior analyst at Forrester Research, has gathered data which shows that people turn to their peers – or people they know when they need information (especially information for making a purchase). When people are researching your products or services, they are going to turn to their peers to see what they think about them.

The Internet makes it extremely easy for anyone to post their opinions on your products – good or bad – and it is very easy for your potential customers to find these opinions. This easy of posting and the ability to easily find competitors has created the need for customer-centric websites and customer-centric companies. You need to know what people are saying about your products and services so you can address those people (to help them and to improve your products). There are many ways to find out what is being said about your company, and in my next series of posts, I’ll be running through some valuable tools in the battle of your brand awareness.

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Web 2.0 Expo – Personal Analytics

Using personal analytics to create a better user experience will help you gain insight into your business and your customers (thus increasing revenue). Ankur Shah (from Techlightenment) used the example of the village bakery in the 1970s – the baker knew what you liked and could make recommendations on what to try based on knowing what you chose for years in the past.

On the web we’ve traditionally asked users for information via long registration forms (which are boring for the user), but there is a lot of information available without having to ask. Amazon.com recommends books and products based upon on what you’ve chosen in the past and what others have chosen is similar to the village bakery. These types of recommendations are part of the implicit web and are valuable for both the user (who sees more things that may be of interest) and to the website (who can sell more books).

Think about every interaction on your website as data about your users which should be treated as content. When your users click on a link, when they signup for an enewsletter, and when they come in from a a search engine, they are giving you valuable information that you can use to enhance their experience. One of the most basic enhancements would be to acknowledge users who come in from search engines with the keywords they came in with and give them relevant links from all over your site.

Obviously there are some fairly large privacy issues with using personal data, but if you are upfront with what you are doing and are providing a valuable service, people will be willing to share their information in exchange (just make sure you are providing valuable, relevant services in return).

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