Get Satisfaction
(Disclosure: Muller has been an adviser to VentureBeat in the past, though he isn't actively involved now.)
The Get Satisfaction site is basically a set of pages built about different companies (the company says there are around 20,000 different pages now) where customers can ask questions, make complaints, and so on. Now those pages have "auto-curation," which automatically sorts the conversations into different categories such as "Questions that need answers," "Recent praise," "Planned ideas," and more. Those discussions originate on the San Francisco company's site, and are also pulled in from other sites, most notably Twitter. By sorting these conversations based on the content, the behavior of the company, and the behavior of the community, Get Satisfaction makes them more useful -- and thus, arguably, further empowers the customers participating in those conversations. Discussions can be shared on the official company websites, too, through Get Satisfaction widgets, and those widgets are now fully customizable.
Muller says this marks a sharp departure from traditional approaches to customer service and customer relationship management, which are "less about a structured way of getting business value, and more about linking customer records."
The redesigned site also places more emphasis on interactions between customers, rather than just between a company and a customer. There are now more "calls to action" on the site asking customers to get involved in discussions and share their knowledge, as well as a new reputation system showing how helpful customers are. Muller notes those reputations also help Get Satisfaction build a community across the different company pages, since a user carries their reputation across the entire Get Satisfaction network.
One last change worth noting tweaks Get Satisfaction's model of building company pages. Even before, a company could create and become involved in a Get Satisfaction page for their customers, but customers could create those pages on their own, too. This has prompted some complaints that Get Satisfaction is misleading readers into thinking its pages are official customer support pages, when they're not. Now the startup offers more transparency about how involved the other companies are, creating a message on the page stating whether a company is actively answering questions, whether it watches the page but isn't active, or if it's completely unaffiliated.
Get Satisfaction has raised a total of $2.5 million in funding. It says it has 13,000 active companies and 15.7 million community members. Competitors include RightNow, Lithium, and Salesforce.com's Service Cloud.
