Crowdsourcing Customer Service

Get Satisfaction's site lets users interact with—and help—multiple companies

by Kerry Miller

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A school project made by the daughter of a Method Products "advocate" using recycled materials.

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Method Products has a problem its competition would envy. The 100-person company asked its customers to help spread the word about its household cleaning products. Now those customers—Method calls them "advocates"—call and send in handwritten letters, homemade crafts projects, and lots of e-mail, more than 2,000 per month. To help ease the strain on the customer support team (two full-timers and a handful of contractors), Method last year added a knowledge base of frequently asked questions to its Web site that includes everything from "Why don't you list ingredients on your bottles?" to "Method's co-founders are cute. Are they single?" Gunther Lie, Method's director of interactive marketing, says that has helped add some rigor to what was formerly a "loosey-goosey" process. But how to deal with the huge volume of indirect communication that abounds on the Web—on blogs, message boards, and social networks—is something Lie admits he's still trying to figure out.

A San Francisco startup called Get Satisfaction hopes to help companies like Method do just that by putting the customers (rather than the company) at the center of the solution.

People Power

Get Satisfaction describes its product as "people-powered customer-service." Named Satisfaction, it is part online forum, part FAQ, and part social network. It works by allowing anyone to ask a question, submit an idea or complaint, or just "talk," all of which gets posted on the public Satisfaction page for everyone to see. Companies can participate directly, too, with their responses marked as official answers, but other users can chime in with answers of their own. A rating system pushes the best ones to the top.

If that sounds simple, that's the point, says co-founder Thor Muller. The problem with most customer-service solutions, he says, is that they're too complex. They're reactive, not proactive, and they require customers to think like an employee or a librarian to find the answers they want. Get Satisfaction's approach, he says, is to help companies think more like customers. By giving users the ability to engage in conversations across multiple companies with a single login, Satisfaction unlocks "a lot of the participation that ordinarily doesn't get realized in the silos of a traditional forum," he says.

Method is one of few dozen companies—including Timbuk2, Twitter, and Digg—that are already experimenting with Satisfaction, which is free both to companies and users. Muller says Get Satisfaction plans to offer fee-based add-ons, such as detailed analytics, after the site's public beta launch in mid-September. (Topic-related advertising might be served up, too.)

Via Valleyschwag

He says the idea for Satisfaction came last year when he and his partners at Web design consultancy Ruby�red Labs launched a now defunct side-project called Valleyschwag, offering Web 2.0 fans the chance to get packages of promotional freebies (BusinessWeek, 6/26/06) like Flickr (YHOO) laptop stickers and Videoegg T-shirts for $15 a month. What began as a geeky in-joke quickly turned into a real business once tech blogger buzz (BusinessWeek, 7/17/07) kicked in, Muller says, and within a few months, Valleyschwag had 1,500 subscribers. That translated into hours of tedious customer-service work each day for Muller and his partners, most of it answering the same few questions via e-mail.