Feedback from customers

dirk — Wed, 20 May 2009 13:48:53 +0000

After launching a new product every company wants to know how the public reacts to their product. The essence of a satisfied customer is not only a good product, but probably more importantly good support for the product. A great online tool for customers to help each other and for companies to discuss with customers is getsatisfaction.

Small online startups don’t have the money to setup a call center for customer support. And yet many of them have a largely satisfied customer base. The reason is that they are very responsive online and that their customers help each other. By setting up an open platform for discussion, they allow customers to publicly discuss various problems and give feedback. Other users of the product can react, give advice and often even solve the problem before a staff member needs to intervene. Of course it is important that official staff participate in all discussions so that customers feel they are heard. But the time spent at resolving problems in such a collective environment is much less than when solving each problem individually.

Getsatisfaction.com, founded in 2007, is a service dedicated to offering an online customer support environment. It is set up to be as transparent as possible for everyone. Whether negative or positive, all feedback is viewable. Customers can second other people’s feedback so that the issues affecting most customers automatically show up at the top. For each topic a color indicates the status of the issue and how the company is responding to it. Green means there’s a solution, red that the problem wasn’t solved yet. Customers can also tell their mood (frustrated, happy, etc…) and give marks to products.

Using Getsatisfaction can be an extremely cost-efficient way to offer support to customers, while at the same time gathering a lot of feedback that would otherwise require costly surveys.

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Feedback from customers