GetSatisfaction.com is in the Adoption Phase of its New Media Life Cycle. To get there, they’ve employed a very focused growth strategy built upon a simple mantra: “the more we empower customers the more that good companies thrive.” (italics theirs)

GetSatisfaction in Adoption Phase of Life Cycle

Get Satisfaction provides an open forum to connect product manufacturers and their customers seeking product support (any product will do). It’s easy to post a gripe/question to the community and just as easy for a company representative to reply. The site itself follows three very basic but very important rules for good user-generated content channels:

1. Enable open communication about a subject of personal importance to the content producer;
2. Provide an easy-to-use interface with few barriers to content creation;
3. Encourage further distribution of the content on and off channel.

The site strives to be more than just a “gripe site” for angry consumers airing profanity-laden grievances about the latest gadget that didn’t work as promised. Get Satisfaction seeks to connect companies with their consumers and provide both with a neutral forum for issue resolution.

Customer Support must be reconsidered

What makes Get Satisfaction work — and why more companies should be adopting their model — is that the site’s content is available to the public and anyone is allowed to chime in. In the internet age, the old model of customer support won’t do. One-to-one resolution of problems may feel like outstanding customer service. But these days, more and more people are turning webways for answers. It’s much more value for the company to get solutions out ahead of the game and available to the eyes looking for answers.

Get Satisfaction is providing consumers and producers with a feedback loop that ensures open communication. Closed support methods like the telephone are now inefficient, given the increase in tech-heavy products that require more step-by-step support. Transparency is the key word when it comes to support nowadays. By providing an easy-to-use, comprehensive forum for customer support, Get Satisfaction shows a remarkable foresight into a better support model for the 21st century. However, only fully transparent engagement in the channel will ensure that it grows in value and quality.

Getting to the Gestation Phase

Encouraging consumers to visit a content channel outside of their control will be a leap of faith for many companies. But the companies that make sure that any issues discussed on Get Satisfaction are swiftly, efficiently, thoroughly, and openly resolved will engender trust and endear themselves to the community. But, this also assumes that there is an audience to respond to. Get Satisfaction’s future success is going to be the result of having balanced traffic of users asking relevant questions and companies providing clear, valuable answers. This “push and pull” of consumers and producers is what will drive the overall quality of the channel.

Additionally, Get Satisfaction may also represent a great opportunity for small and mid-sized companies that don’t have the resources available to have the kind of full-scale support departments that larger competitors may employ. They could gain valuable insight and perhaps alleviate support issues with the help of a focused user community.

It behooves Get Satisfaction to continue encouraging big name companies to engage in the community and provide thorough responses to user issues. I’ve written about Whole Foods before. They’re making engaging their audience well on Get Satisfaction and going out of their way to respond, even to seemingly benign questions that arise. But in perusing questions like this, I learned that the people asking the questions are Whole Foods’ most devoted customers, and each genuine response from Whole Foods further encourages those people to recommend them. The result: genuine word-of-mouth marketing.

A Couple of Concerns

I have a couple of concerns with the growth of Get Satisfaction. First of all, as they’ve grown, the amount of time the average user spends on the sight has fallen from about five minutes to two minutes. In talking to Eric Sagalyn, our technology genius and a frequent user of Get Satisfaction, it may be that the higher volume of participants the lower quality the content. Get Satisfaction has some content scaling issues. Also, more than 25% of the traffic at Get Satisfaction comes from one website: Zappos. I know Zappos is very progressive in their adoption of new technologies, however, this poses a risk to Get Satisfaction. They need much wider participation in the Adoption phase.

The takeaway

If you’re a company that provides an exemplary customer support experience (you can usually tell by the gracious thanks of your customers and good sales numbers), why not make those interactions consumable by all?

Conversely, if you’re a company that struggles under a support deluge, Get Satisfaction is an excellent channel for disseminating valuable content that could potentially mitigate problems before they escalate. Remember, the first step is just admitting you have a problem. Honesty breeds trust.

I recommend you start spending time on Get Satisfaction. See what you think of the platform and the content challenges.

My questions to you

Do you see value in participating in an open environment where your customers can interact with you? Would you pay for this service? What do you think of their content challenges? What’s going to happen in the Gestation phase? Will you be the big success story that launches Get Satisfaction into the spotlight?