Getting Satisfaction

The awesome folks over at Get Satisfaction launched two sweet new features today. I’m extremely pleased to add that Joby was among the very first to implement beta versions of their new Help Center software.

Over the past few days I’ve been working on getting our Joby version of the Help Center up and running, and I’m pleased to show off our installation to the world. I can’t say enough about the folks over at Get Satisfaction – especially Lane, Thor and Scott (their lead developer), who have been extremely helpful the entire time. Those guys really do know customer service.

In case you’re interested, here’s the full press release, which includes a little quote from me:

Starting today, companies on the Get Satisfaction support network can respond directly to posts in the public Twitter stream, and incorporate those conversations into their own Web sites. Overheard bridges the public Twitter stream into Get Satisfaction’s support network. Help Center seamlessly integrates Get Satisfaction’s support network into the company’s own Web site.

With Overheard, companies can support customer conversations across the Web. Overheard lists out recent Twitter posts (“tweets”) related to a company and allows any user – employee or customer – to convert a selected tweet into a rich, searchable Get Satisfaction topic. When someone replies to a tweet via Overheard, Get Satisfaction sends a public reply to that person to let them know a discussion was started in response to their issue.

Comcast bridges Twitter to its Get Satisfaction community in order to not only discover customers outside of their traditional systems, but also respond to them:

“What a great way to work with other social media websites! Overheard is a great way for a company to stay connected to their customers on the web.” – Frank Eliason, Comcast Corporation

Yahoo!’s MyBlogLog uses Help Center ( http://getsatisfaction.com/for_companies/help_center ) to give customers a consistent, branded customer service experience with network benefits:

“We try to reach our customers wherever they are. Our bloggers speak to us through their own blogs, Twitter, and many other channels. We want to bring all of these conversations into MyBlogLog so that all members can benefit from the discussion. We’re excited about Overheard and Help Center because these services enable us not only to respond to our customers in a uniform and focused manner, but also to connect via the channels that our customers are already using.” – Ian Kennedy, Product Manager at MyBlogLog, a Yahoo! company.

Joby (maker of the GorillaPod) was also quick to leverage Help Center’s branding advantage:

“We like using Get Satisfaction, and jumped at the opportunity to use the Help Center at Joby.com. I’m a big fan of anything that makes my life easier, and now I can give customers quick answers while keeping them on our site. As an added benefit, the branding is our own and we can provide a consistent Joby experience.” – Peter Berg, Joby.

Help Center is an open source help application, written in PHP and powered by Get Satisfaction Web Services. This open source approach enabled MyBlogLog to embed Get Satisfaction’s customer service engine within its own Web site for a seamless customer service experience:

“MyBlogLog took advantage of Help Center’s open source code because it gave us more control. It was easy for our developer to use the Get Satisfaction API to match our own look and feel, and we had greater flexibility to use the Get Satisfaction customer service engine to meet our needs.” – Ian Kennedy, Product Manager at MyBlogLog, a Yahoo! company.

Help Center has a customizable look and feel, is extensible into internal customer relationship management applications, and supports quick localization. Though Help Center was just released privately this week, the company was pleased to discover that one open source developer has already delivered German translation.

Links to Early Overheard Adopters:

•    http://getsatisfaction.com/comcast/overheard
•    http://getsatisfaction.com/oreilly/overheard
•    http://getsatisfaction.com/seesmic/overheard
•    http://getsatisfaction.com/mybloglog/overheard

Links to Early Help Center Adopters:

•    http://www.mybloglog.com/gs/
•    http://joby.com/support/
•    http://help.skitch.com/

About Get Satisfaction:

Get Satisfaction ( http://www.getsatisfaction.com ) is a Web-based support network that delivers customer service from the outside in. Constructive, customer-focused communities for companies and products emerge within this ‘Switzerland’ for company-customer engagement. The company is privately held and institutional investors include First Round Capital, O’Reilly Alphatech Ventures, and SoftTechVC.