Website Ushers in New Era of Customer Service and Transparency

Ruby Tuesday Pick of the Week: Get Satisfaction
Why It’s a Gem: One website helps both companies and their customers with an improved customer-service experience

Many small businesses put customer service on the back burner not because they don’t believe in it, but because it’s just too darn time consuming. But one website is changing that. Get Satisfaction is using technology to build communities that save both companies and customers time, money, and a whole lot of hair-pulling.

Any entrepreneur who has ever lamented the time spent performing redundant customer-service tasks needs to examine Get Satisfaction’s wide range of tools – or stop calling himself an entrepreneur. (This interview has been edited for clarity and length.)

Lynda Resnick: In this week’s Ruby Tuesday, we’re speaking with Lane Becker, President and Co-Founder of the website GetSatisfaction.com. For our readers, Lane, would you please describe your business model and what you do? This is something that a lot of people need to learn about.

Lane Becker: We do what we call “people-powered” customer service. We think of customer service not as a private email or phone conversation that you have with one person inside the company. We think of customer service as an open, public conversation with a bunch of different people.

What Get Satisfaction does is provide an online community where anybody can come and talk about any product, service, or company that matters to them – whether they love it or hate it. They can ask questions and get answers, and those answers can come from other customers just as easily as from employees of the company. Or they can report problems that they’re having, and they can get solutions. Or they can share ideas with each other, because a lot of people have ideas about how they want to see the product improved or how they’ve used the product in an interesting or different way.

LR: Wow. How 21st century of you! Does a company have to sign up with you in order to be part of the discussion?

Lane Becker, President and Co-Founder of Get Satisfaction

LB: To be part of the discussion, yes. But that’s not always how it starts. Anybody can go to our site, GetSatisfaction.com, and search for any company in our database. If it’s not there, they can add it. It’s really easy. It takes three minutes to add the company and one of its products into the system.

The conversation is better when the employees are there, but it’s not necessary. At any time, a company can come in and, if the customers are there and the company is already participating, they can do what we call “claim their space.” They can hop in and say, “Hey, I actually work for this company.” We do a little bit of work on our part to make sure that it’s a legitimate claim, and then they can actively start participating in the conversation too. As of yesterday, we have a little over 15,000 companies listed in GetSatisfaction.com, and of those 15,000 companies, over 10,000 of them, more than two-thirds, have actually claimed their space.

LR: You launched two years ago. How did you come up with this idea?

LB: I have two business partners, Thor and Amy, and they were running a technology consulting company. They ended up doing, as part of a side project, an online e-commerce company, selling goods and services through a subscription service.

Suddenly, their side project was taking up way more of their time than their actual day jobs. Because they were passionate, because all their subscribers were passionate, there was a lot of communication. But it was just the two of them and a couple of other employees, and all of a sudden they were getting flooded with all this email.

On the one hand they have this problem: They want to give great customer service, but they were just a small company. At the same time, they started to notice a really interesting thing: In the comment section of their blog, a lot of customers were asking the same questions that they were getting via email. But on the blog, other customers were answering those questions for them. They had this little light bulb moment, and this is when I started talking to them and said, “Hey, we could put these two things together, [get customers to] ask these questions publicly.”

They could get that same level of great customer service, because they’re actually creating communities, giving customers a place to communicate with each other. They’re actually continuing to build that customer loyalty and that brand loyalty that they want to have, but they would do it in a way that was much, much, much more cost and time efficient than having to handle each email individually. It’s a win-win situation.

LR: How many people go on your site?

LB: Since we launched, we’ve had about 11 million visitors. We have 2 million unique visitors a month right now. Six months ago, we had 1 million.

LR: How do you monetize the site?

LB: We actually sell services to the companies that get invested in our system. We have a pretty significant [range of] free products, and the vast majority of companies are just responding to customers — that’s totally free. We encourage that level of activity. But some companies come to us and say, “Wow, this is a really fantastic system. We’ve managed to reduce the email traffic we get by some significant percentage. But now we want it integrated with our existing systems.”

So, that’s what we do. We’ll brand it, we’ll put it on your site instead of our site, we’ll change the look and feel. We’ll make it look like your trouble-ticket system, your CRM system, whatever. That’s pretty much how we make our money.

We’re starting to get really interesting requests. We’re still trying to figure this part out, because we’re so new, but we’re starting to hear from government agencies and large non-profit organizations. When you start to broaden the model a little bit to what customer service means, you realize the USDA could actually stand to start having this kind of conversation with its customers.

FIJI Water's page on Get Satisfaction

LR: Or the FDA, or whatever. In my book, Rubies in the Orchard, I have three pillars of success: value, unique selling proposition, and community and transparency. This transparency issue is so fabulous that you’re offering your customers. It’s scary for people. I just went on and found FIJI [on GetSatisfaction.com] and the comment was, “Fiji thinks we’re stupid.” They were talking about my green initiative, where every time you pick up a bottle of FIJI Water you’re giving 20% back to the grid, because we’ve bought back our carbon offsets, reduced our plastic, and so forth.

A lot of companies would be frightened by that. I love it. Because when someone says that, it gives me an opportunity to get out there and explain in detail why we did what we did, how we did it, how we represent 3% of the GDP of the Fijian government, what we do for the people of Fiji, and so forth and so on. And if people just think these things and never put them out there, I don’t have an opportunity to answer them. So, I hope that businesses embrace your idea, because I think it’s brilliant. I really do. Now, what kind of competition do you have out there?

LB: With this particular bent on this model, I think we are the only one doing it. There’s different kinds of competition, so there are other companies that offer more traditional forum systems, bulletin board systems. Compared to us, I find them much less focused around the business environment. If you look at the way our system works, people are asking questions and it is framed as a question, or they are reporting a problem and it is framed to the problem. There’s an expectation that a solution will come of it. We refer to it as “outcome oriented.” We want to create positive outcomes.

Your point, by the way, was awesome. You’re my hero. I might quote you when I talk to other people about this, because that’s a really important point about embracing transparency as an opportunity.

LR: You have to be transparent, because you have an opportunity to have a dialogue. Without a dialogue, what are people thinking?

LB: Yes. So, in those situations, you really have to jump on top of it and respond to those people. Your customers are going to have that conversation whether you’re there or not.

LR: Exactly.

LB: With Google, people search for “FIJI Water” online and these things are going to come up. People are going to start to frame their opinion about your brand through that conversation. If you jump into that conversation and respond to it in a positive way, that is an opportunity for a really compelling brand experience. They see there is a human being on the other side of that conversation. And it’s not just the one person you spoke with that’s going to find that — it’s anyone who [searches] Google. So, you have this one-on-one, somewhat intimate interaction with someone where you turned it from a negative to a positive reaction, just by being open and honest and transparent. That really scales.

LR: How are you building the site? How are you bringing customers in? Are you working on SEO? What do you do so the blogosphere picks up these comments? Or do they?

LB: About 35% of our traffic comes from Google. The biggest part of our traffic actually comes from companies that have embraced our system. We make it really easy to embed widgets on their sites in different places. That’s how you get the email reduction and the cost reduction.

LR: Is it expensive to join your service? How do you charge people?

LB: It’s free to join our service. The vast majority of the 10,000 companies that are in there are free. We’re happy for them to stay free forever. We’ll identify you as employees, and you can claim your space and use the widget — all of that is free. We charge a small amount. Right now, it’s $99 a month.

LR: And what do you get for $99 a month?

LB: You get what we call “gardening tools.” When you’re in the system for free, there’s a lot of clean-up that you’re going to want to do. We have a “real frequently asked questions” [widget], because it actually will show the most frequently asked questions from your customers in real time. One of the things that it does is show the title of the questions that your customers have typed in. Sometimes the titles aren’t great, and you want to clean it up a little bit. The old title remains, but you can change the title as it appears. For example, you can go in and say, “This topic is out of date,” and point them to a new topic. You can delete things that are spam or that are overly commercial. So, gardening tools is what you get — more control over the environment.

LR: Do you edit for nasty and personal comments and things like that?

LB: We do as a company. Our team at Get Satisfaction has flags that you and people on our site can use for material that is inappropriate or spam. We have one flag that’s called “Crass Commercialism” for people who are trying to promote their own products and services in somebody else’s area. We remove all of that. If you pay the $99 a month, you can do that yourself.

In some ways, that seems antithetical to the idea of transparency; we don’t think it is. I think any social system online requires some degree of gardening. In any space, you need to maintain it. In our space, we have the “Change Log.” It’s a pretty neat little tool. It’s a page you can go to in any company’s area that says, “Here are the changes that we’ve made.” It’s just part of being open and transparent. These are the interesting challenges that companies have to learn how to manage and how to balance in this environment.

LR: Exactly.

LB: And that’s the other piece of our business model. Our Community Management team has gotten really good at figuring out the ways in which companies need to behave differently when they’re speaking to customers publicly as opposed to speaking to customers privately. It can be the same person, but it’s a slightly different set of skills. We built up these skills over time, and that’s actually an area where we can really help companies.

LR: That’s right. I was going to suggest that, that you should counsel companies on how to work in this kind of space.

LB: Oh yeah, it’s a big initiative for us this year. We actually just started a new webcast that’s all about community management at GetSatisfaction.tv. We’re staring to offer training and consulting services for some of the larger companies that want to use us. The example you just gave about FIJI Water and how to respond to negative criticism, that is the sort of thing that we will teach.

LR: In every threat, there’s an opportunity. That is one of the lessons I’ve learned in life. It only works if you have a value-based company. It only works if you’re doing the right thing for mankind. But if you are, you want to get into every negative conversation, because that’s your opportunity to turn it around. Those who put their head in the sand will not survive in this new era. It just won’t work.

LR: I’m interested in your company. I think it’s fantastic. I think it has a lot of potential. This is the first time in all my Ruby Tuesdays that I have ever said, “I’m going to call you back again.”

LB: I would love that. I would be overjoyed.

LR: Take care, darling.