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Every company tries to sell the notion that “customer satisfaction is our #1 priority.” Well, get satisfaction says “prove it.” And let me tell you, I love them for that.

What is GetSatisfaction

GetSatisfaction is a site that acts as a user-to-user support board for companies and products, but it’s a lot more than that. Where company support forums are semi-private and only deal with that company’s products, GetSatisfaction is a support site for EVERYTHING you use online. Any company can set up an account for free, allowing users to ask questions, give suggestions, or just talk with other users. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s take a look.

GetSatisfaction For Users

If you’re a user (and by that, I mean not a representative of a company. I’m not making inferences about drug habits here. This is a family blog.), you can either go straight to the site itself, or you can find GetSatisfaction links on sites you already use.

Twitter uses GetSatisfaction on their help page. By embedding the GetSatisfaction code, users are able to search topics, ask a question, and see all the active discussions about twitter happening on GetSatisfaction.

Clicking on one of the discussions brings you over to:

The topic page on GetSatisfaction where the threaded conversation is happening. But let’s pretend we’re going in cold. We have a problem with Twitter, and you can’t find the answer anywhere. Let’s run through that.

Step One: Go to the Twitter Page On GetSatisfaction-

After searching for Twitter I land on their page.

On this page I can see that twitter has 14 employees on GetSatisfaction ready to help me out. I can see their products and services, as well as the recently active topics on Twitter.

Step Two: Ask Your Question

I’ve already looked and couldn’t find anything in the existing topics. So I go to the “What do you want to ask?” box, type in my question and click go.

Step Three: Categorize Your Question

Let GetSatisfaction know if you’ve got a question that needs an answer, an idea you’d like to share, a problem that needs solving, or a discussion you’d like to start. Then, you can give your question a title.

Now this is what I love. You can tag your question with words, then you can tell you how the issue makes you feel!!!!

If you’ve filled in everything, the GetSatisfaction Notice-o-Meter will let you know the chance that someone will answer your question.

Using GetSatisfaction As A Company

If you’re a company, it’s incredibly simple to get an account for your product or service. You just sign up, claim your company, and they verify that you actually work at the company you claim. Then, you just upload a text file to the root of your web server and you’re done. You can add other employees, change roles, and you’re all set to join the conversation.

The 5 Reasons GetSatisfaction Pretty Much Rules

1. As a user, you can get your questions answered- Where you’d expect canned responses, “we’ll look into it”, and non-answers, you’re far more likely to get the right answer on GetSatisfaction. Why? Well, it’s public. When you move a company’s support forum out of the dark and into the public square, you up their accountability. The non-critical answer is that when you combine user-to-user support with company employees, you get better answers.
2. As a user, you can see how others use the products and services you are interested in- Browsing through discussion topics related to the products you use can be a great way to find new uses.
3. As a company, you can see the questions your users have, answer them, and avoid repeating the same answers to the same questions- As a company, you absolutely want to help out the very people using your products, and in doing so, you want to build goodwill. This is a great way to do both, in an easy-to-find, searchable way.
4. As a company, you can directly interact with early adopters and see what they think of your offering- It’s so important for startups to be able to help out the early users of their products. Otherwise, they’ll bail.
5. As a complete web startup addict, GetSatisfaction can introduce you to new stuff you’ve never heard of- I love finding something I’ve never heard of on GetSatisfaction. That way I can browse through the discussions, decide whether it’s worth signing up, and move along.

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