Get Satisfaction provides businesses a third-party web-based customer support service. The service got an HTML5 mobile makeover this week. Businesses with paid plans now have a mobile Get Satisfaction presence for customers who use an iPhone or iPod touch.
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Not providing customer support for free versions of your applications “is ass-backwards,” according to Get Satisfaction founder and chief technology officer Thor Muller, who gave a presentation titled, appropriately enough, “Business Freemium Customer Satisfaction” at Freemium Summit East in New York Monday.
“Free users won’t convert or tell others if they can’t get past first wall,” Muller said, adding, “Support needs to be embedded in the product. It actually needs to be a consideration in product development. Freemium only works if customers are delighted.”
According to Muller, most application providers follow the support strategy of starting out ad hoc, followed by implementing a help desk, forums, and social support (social engagement, communities of interest, word of mouth).
He added that Mint.com took its support model public and not only dropped weekly support tickets from 6,500 to 1,500, but picked up more than 50,000 ideas on how to improve its products. Yola, meanwhile, created a customer community and placed it front and center, which was good, but the company actually responded too quickly at first and wasn’t giving customers the ability to respond to each other.
“Is it worth supporting free customers?” Muller asked. “If it isn’t worth it and you don’t make a change, then you end up creating a customer slum.”
This week Kleiner Perkins opens up a new $250MM fund for social media related companies, Get Satisfaction teams up with GoodData, Conversation Monitor launches new features listening in on the Twitter conversations around brands, and emails turn into CRM tickets with ContactMe…
Get Satisfaction is an online site where customers can voice their complaints and companies are given the opportunity to respond. It makes the entire dialogue public in turn making the dialogue a database for future frustrated customers. I’ve been to a number of conferences where an attendee has brought up the site.
For the longest time I just didn’t get it but the site’s new overheard feature makes a lot of sense. As MG Siegler pointed out this morning, the Overheard feature integrates a Twitter stream (via Summize) centered around your product right into your company’s Get Satsifaction page. There are a number of companies using Get Satisfaction but currently those companies appear to be limited to web based services for the most part. That appears to be expanding though as Chase bank,Comcast and Verizon Wireless all have their own pages.
So far Comcast, O’Reilly, Seesmic and MyBlogLog have signed up to leverage the Overheard service but a number of others will be joining soon. One other product that Get Satisfaction just announced is the Help Center which enables companies to put a support area directly on their site while still using the Get Satisfaction service. What’s great about this is that companies who don’t know about Twitter can immediately take advantage of it just by using the Get Satisfaction service.
Previously, I had not been very active in Get Satisfaction forums but I’m definitely going to become a more active user. Have you used Get Satsifaction? What do you think of this new service offering?
