Get Satisfaction – Customer-Driven Customer Service

After spending an hour waiting on hold for the customer service from your cable company or cell phone carrier, you know first-hand how valuable – and rare – good customer service can be. One website, Get Satisfaction, has created a seemingly impossible solution to this problem: open and free conversations between customers and company representatives.

Get Satisfaction users discuss issues for over 2,500 companies and growing, from Apple to Twitter. A surprising advantage is that a company doesn’t have to participate to be part of this customer-driven site. About half of the companies on Get Satisfaction are added by customers, without company participation. Often, however, businesses will join in on conversations, and this is where honest communication between customer and company begins. In fact, many businesses have started using Get Satisfaction as their official customer service communications tool.

Why does Get Satisfaction work so well? As the founder of the site suggests, a company’s best customers often know more about a product and can provide more help than customer service representatives or online documentation can. Many customers are passionate about helping others solve problems – and often, these conversations focus on solutions, rather than problems alone. A surprising side effect is that even large companies, like Comcast, become more personal on Get Satisfaction. Using this forum, customer service truly does start to feel like a service.