Review: GetSatisfaction a Win-Win for Customers and Brands

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By John Cantwell

GetSatisfaction.com is an excellent new website that can help companies and brands monitor and manage their online reputation from a centralized location. By combining aspects of social networks and the traditional customer service experience (i.e., interacting with a living human), the site offers a deeply personal experience that allows customers to resolve their problems and brands to put out fires before they spread wildly.

The concept of GetSatisfaction is simple. Users seek out the companies and brands they use. If they’ve got a problem, a question, or a related idea, they just post it to the company or brand forum. It’s up to the company what happens next. The more active players on GetSatisfaction - companies like Apple and Seesmic - have a number of different employees that monitor the feedback posted in the forums and respond accordingly.

The site, then, offers a win-win scenario for both the consumer and the supplier. The customer (hopefully) gets the feedback they’re looking for, and the company gains the advantage of a positive interaction that helps it boost and manage its image. And because conversations can be viewed by all community members, there’s the potential for a long tail effect - users can see the companies that provide excellent service over time, meaning the company’s performance on GetSatisfaction can speak volumes about its dedication to customers.

There are limitations to GetSatisfaction. It is a relatively new site, so there are a lot of people that still don’t know about it. That, of course, may change over time. The idea of GetSatisfaction ultimately implies that a paradigm shift will need to occur with consumers. Instead of going to the company or store where they purchased the item - as they’ve likely done all their lives - or to a brand-specific forum (as more Web-savvy users may do), customers must begin to think of GetSatisfaction as THE resource for their customer service needs.

Whether or not this happens will depend largely on whether companies decide to adopt GetSatisfaction as a service platform. The site is pretty Web- and tech-centric right now. Companies like Skype and AT&T don’t even have any employees monitoring conversations right now. (They may want to consider getting on board.)

GetSatisfaction is a step up over many of the brand management and impression-monitoring tools we’ve seen. For one, nobody seems 100% sure about how to cull impressions from across the vast expanse of the Internet. Centralizing the experience for the user and the company makes things simpler on both ends. And the site is definitely a step up over the algorithm-based services that attempt to gauge overall user sentiments and impressions (check out Matt’s post from last week about some of the wacky results he got on Summize where Osama Bin Laden, apparently, is quite popular.) And because GetSatisfaction is independent, it has the advantage of impartiality that many company-run online forums lack.

Everybody knows by now that monitoring and managing your brand’s online reputation is a crucial aspect of any marketing or PR campaign. GetSatisfaction is a promising way of simplifying this (oftentimes daunting) task.