Frequently asked questions

1. How is Get Satisfaction different from a community forum?

Get Satisfaction is a space where customers and employees can have open, unrestricted conversations with each other about topics of interest. But unlike a community forum, we've built Get Satisfaction to capture structured data about customer ideas, problems, questions, and praise. That structure includes the ability for other customers to offer solutions and rank and prioritize topics with the "me too" button, as well as the ability for the company to set the status for topics (e.g. "in progress") and to mark certain topics as solved. Get Satisfaction communities are much better than forums because they're focused on producing tangible results.

2. Does Get Satisfaction integrate with ticketing or bug tracking system?

Although it was never our goal to build a product that would replace forums, bug trackers, or CRM systems, the light data structure of Get Satisfaction topics allows us to build integration points that play nice with your other internal ticketing and bug tracking systems ... and in some cases, replace them. We're constantly looking at better ways to integrate so that Get Satisfaction can be the customer support channel of choice for companies of all sizes.

3. How scalable is Get Satisfaction?

Some of our most active communities, like Twitter, are supported by only a handful of customer support staff. How is this possible? Our special sauce is based on three simple principles that ultimately save time and money by community-sourcing common customer concerns:

1. Get Satisfaction topics are restricted to four categories — problems, questions, ideas, and praise. This gives your employees and support staff the ability to participate in conversations to the extent that their participation supports specific customer outcomes.
2. You answer the question or solve the problem once and everyone gets the benefit. We have made the topic search algorithm and functionality strong enough to intercept the most common customer concerns. Since most customer concerns are very repetitive, this is where having customer conversations out in public on the Get Satisfaction platform is a huge benefit.
3. We harness the power of collaborative problem solving. We've baked collaboration into the system so that all topic participants are kept in the conversation and updated via email as progress is made. We've also given participants and employees the ability to loop other stakeholders in on the conversation so that your internal experts can join the conversation when it's most appropriate.

4. What do you do about negativity and other bad behavior in Get Satisfaction?

In today's inter-connected, internet-powered world, this is the wrong question to be asking. Let's face it ... No matter how many communications barriers you put up, legal opinions you seek, or PR campaigns you undertake, the fact is that your web-savvy customers are going to talk about you online anyway. So why not join the conversation? We've found that the more open and responsive companies are on Get Satisfaction, the more focused and productive the customer conversations become. This is because antagonistic customers didn't start out that way ... they started out with a problem, question, or concern ... and only became negative when they felt like they weren't being heard. Company responsiveness is the best way to address negativity and Get Satisfaction gives companies the ability to respond, get support from evangelists, and leverage the power of the open community to meet common goals.

5. Do you support single sign-on that links activity in Get Satisfaction back to the unique user IDs in company systems?

One of the most common feature requests that we've gotten from companies is for seamless sign-on, so that customers do not have to go through a separate registration process to engage in conversations on Get Satisfaction. Great news! Starting in January 2009, we're launching FastPass, a new feature that allows private data to be passed between the company and customers. This allows for a seamless experience as your customers come to Get Satisfaction, and it also lets you associate all customer activity in Get Satisfaction with their unique user data in your system. Not only does this eliminate the need for users to have a separate Get Satisfaction account, it will also link all of their Get Satisfaction activity to the unique UserID in your system. This will allow you to take action on topics by escalating customer service requests into your internal systems. All the user will need to do is to respond to a one-time email request that gives permission for us to access that data from your system ... and this permission can be rescinded at any time at the user's request. This makes integrating Get Satisfaction into your systems fast, easy, and seamless for the customer.

6. Can a company integrate a Get Satisfaction support community into its own site?

"Yes!" When we started Get Satisfaction, the interaction was 100% on our domain so that we could give companies the benefit of participating in conversations in a neutral third-party environment ... a "Switzerland for customer service." Since then, we've given companies many options for bringing part or all of the customer conversation into their own domain so that they can create a branded user experience that is consistent with the rest of their site. These options include: widgets that search and pull topics from Get Satisfaction and premium access to our API. We are constantly offering more options for companies to create a seamless implementation of Get Satisfaction on their own domain.

7. How much development time is required for setting up a Get Satisfaction community?

You can set-up your support community in a few minutes, and then pilot implementation of our service at little or no cost. You can do this by installing one of our widgets on your "help," "support," or "contact us" pages and assigning a staff member or two to answer questions that arise on Get Satisfaction. Sign up for our Basic Package (with free trial period) to moderate those conversations and give employees access to our community management toolkit. At this level of use, we are confident that Get Satisfaction will quickly prove effective in lowering your volume of support email while increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty. When you are ready to customize your implementation by utilizing our API or FastPass technology for seamless sign-on, we're available to help you evaluate the logistics and likely ROI of such an integration.
Learn more about our pro package.

8. What's the catch? Is Get Satisfaction really expensive?

We get this question a lot, and we're happy to say that there is no catch. Setting up your company community, getting employee badges, and installing widgets is free and easy ... we don't charge installation or set-up fees, and you can start participating in customer conversations right away on our free, ad-supported service. If you want to do more than just reply to customers, our Basic package allows you to fully moderate and optimize your support community for only $99/month.

Our Pro package is designed for companies with larger customer bases and allows more options for seamless integration. For this package, pricing is based on volume of usage. We've intentionally priced our Pro service below enterprise knowledgebase and forum services. However, Get Satisfaction meets the needs of both! Contact us for consultation on your business needs and to get an estimate of monthly costs.