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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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Get Satisfaction
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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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Does your business website need buzz?

What do RoR, APIs, Interactive Media, Mashups, and Product Communities all have in common? Well other than they all make up the bottom row of this year’s Buzzword Bingo card, all five are technologies that you aren’t using but should be.

Here’s a truism – Really good websites create buzz about your product or service. To create that excitement, you have to find a compelling feature, function or attribute that causes a positive reaction. When Macromedia’s Flash first came out, people were unimpressed. So it was a web animation tool for advertisers to make monkeys move really fast back and forth in a banner ad, big deal. It only became a big deal when really talented designers began making sites that generated attention. That attention separated the really good sites from the no talent hack imitators, solidifying their product and/or service in the minds of their viewers. The same can be said for each of the technologies in that list. Used properly and in moderation (as with most things in life) you can create some truly impressive results. Those results, in collaboration with smart marketing, will never fail to deliver the all important buzz.

In what looks to be a longish series of posts, I hope to convince you that one or more of the above can help your business website stand out.

  • Ruby on Rails (RoR) thinks it can, and does
  • Application Programming Interfaces (API’s) and why they aren’t just for geeks
  • Interactive Media talks back
  • Mashups = Your chocolate in my Peanut Butter
  • You can make a community about anything these days (Product Communities)