Business

Get Satisfaction. Turning customer service on its head.

Not long ago, when it came time to choose a technology platform for his web startup, Lane Becker faced a hard-nosed, practical decision. He knew that when you’re launching a business, “you don’t want to focus on anything except the product you’re trying to build. When you’re starting a small company, every minute and every dollar counts.” Guided by those priorities, he made his choice. “With the Mac it’s really easy to get up and running,” Lane says. And for those employees who used PCs previously, “it’s easy to get people started”.

Get Satisfaction, a company founded by Lane and husband-and-wife team Thor and Amy Muller, is designed to give customers of any company, anywhere in the world, that same level of satisfaction. How? By creating and hosting an online forum where users of a product or service can chat with each other and company representatives. Now, waiting in a long phone queue for customer service is just a painful memory. With Get Satisfaction, help is just a few clicks away.

A blog gives birth to a business

The idea for Get Satisfaction emerged from Amy and Thor’s experience at another startup, when the couple noticed that people using their Valleyschwag site—a service selling promotional materials and gifts from corporate events—were handling support issues for one another on the Valleyschwag blog, providing fast, effective peer-to-peer customer assistance, known as crowdsourcing. Thor and Amy then partnered with their friend Lane to develop getsatisfaction.com, and took the crowdsourcing idea one step further, inviting companies to participate. The entrepreneurial trio launched getsatisfaction.com in September 2007.

“We realized that if you could re-imagine customer support as a community conversation between users and the company,” Lane says, “rather than as an overloaded and understaffed call center, all sorts of good things will happen.”

It’s less than a year old, but getsatisfaction.com has already attracted inquiries regarding the products and services of almost 6,000 companies. More impressive still is the fact that hundreds of the companies join their customers in the ongoing discussions, with businesses like Comcast, Whole Foods, Google, and eBay monitoring the site regularly to weigh in. Lane estimates that since its launch the site’s traffic and users have increased by about “30 percent month-over-month.”

In addition to facilitating direct, mutually beneficial customer/company conversations, Lane sees getsatisfaction.com providing another highly valuable benefit in the future— enabling what he calls “automatic focus groups” that can aid companies in the development and refinement of their products. Lane believes the potential value to companies of “product co-creation” driven by getsatisfaction.com conversations is substantial. “Customers have a lot of ideas and opinions. They usually know your product better than you do, because they use it more than you do, and in different ways.” Lane has talked to companies that have paid as much as $20,000 to convene an “extraordinarily targeted, highly articulate” focus group, he says. “Now it’s essentially free.”

Made on a Mac. And it shows

Get Satisfaction, which now employs eight and has raised $1.3 million in venture capital backing, is humming along on its all-Apple infrastructure, from the staging server used to test their code to the machines used to write code, from the MacBook notebook and iMac desktop computers on employees’ desks to the iPhone mobile phones in all their pockets. “We get things done faster, cheaper, and more entertainingly, too,” Lane says, “if you include our Mac mini music server”—which Get Satisfaction uses daily to serve up an endless stream of mood-enhancing tunes to its employees.