Brands love Get Satisfaction because we provide the best place for them to engage their users. We give brands a place to listen, a place to resolve, and a place to allow community members to talk to one another and discuss products. Our ability to pump serious SEO juice into these conversations make Get Satisfaction topics a self-service support dream–resolve an issue once in our community and you can be sure that other users with the same question will find that topic next time they look for answers through organic search.

Sometimes, especially in highly technical products or help-desk scenarios, self-service just isn’t enough. Organizations may want to pull users out of Get Satisfaction conversations and into more private channels. Topic-to-ticket integrations solve this problem to some extent–but what if you want to provide live agent support right now, with full screen sharing capabilities, to further improve the time to resolution and customer satisfaction?

Enter the Citrix GoToAssist integration. Now, for our joint customers, Get Satisfaction users can escalate conversations into one-on-one sessions, first in chat and then in a remote desktop sharing session.

When users initiate a remote support session, they will be dropped into a chat session, where the agent can offer to begin a remote desktop sharing experience.

Once remote sharing begins, the end user and agent can work together to resolve the issue quickly and thoroughly.  Not only does adding community to your live agent solution provide a self-service front end for your support process, it also provides a place where agents can return to post helpful hints so future customers can help themselves in the community.

We are excited to bring GoToAssist into our suite of integration partners and look forward to the value our joint offerings will bring to our customers!

To learn more about the integration, click here.

For instructions on how to install this integration (currently available to Get Satisfaction Enterprise customers only) check out configuration details in the Get Satisfaction Developer’s Community.

Over the past year, we’ve been heads down at The Satisfactory listening, learning, and creating our next big move in this hyperactive “social-everything” marketplace.

From the early days of Get Satisfaction, we’ve been consistent and deliberate with our “outside in/ everywhere” strategy. We knew customers wanted (and are now demanding) an open and transparent place to connect with other like-minded people. They want to have a conversation that results in a productive outcome that ultimately creates a trusted relationship with the products, services, and brands they care about. We bet on the notion that trusted online relationships are the foundation of any good business.

From the hottest start-ups like Flipboard and OMGPOP to trusted brands like Intuit’s Mint.com and Pampers, companies of all sizes join Get Satisfaction’s network of 65,000 communities because they want to connect with their customers. Because they, too, believe that trusted online relationships are the foundation of any good business. And now, we’re making it easier than ever for companies to bring community to their customers, anywhere they are.

Today, we are thrilled to announce Get Satisfaction Engage: a new widget architecture that gives companies the ability to quickly create and change widgets that carry a seamless in-brand and in-application experience.

With Get Satisfaction Engage, you can bring community to any (or every) page of your website with just a couple of clicks, exposing relevant conversations that benefit both you and your customers. With Get Satisfaction Engage, customers can engage in conversation with other customers without ever having to leave your website. Your customers will be able to see the hottest topics being discussed, vote on ideas, and discover content that will bring them closer to your product, your marketing content, or the help section of your site.

Koodo uses Get Satisfaction conversations to connect with their customers around specific products

Get Satisfaction Engage is part of our Anywhere strategy: we enable companies to engage with their customers anywhere they are, whether it’s your website Facebook, search, or on a mobile device. Engage is in limited availability today and will be made available to all customers starting May 30th. You can see it in action on our website right now.

And as always, please visit our community for any questions, feedback, problems, or praise. We’ve built a world class customer engagement platform by listening to you and all of our customers, so let’s keep the conversation going.

Recently our beloved developer Josh took a relaxing beach vacation to Mexico while the rest of us stayed behind to release a huge project. Naturally, we wanted to prank him in a way that would cause both joy and pain, and came up with the idea of tricking out his iMac with post-it notes (just the sticky parts) to create a large Nyan Cat mosaic!

The first challenge was finding all the colors we needed. Only two colors from our office stash were useful (light blue for the background and pop tart pink). We found most of what we needed at a nearby Daiso (orange, yellow, green, darker blue, purple, beige for the pop tart bread, brighter pink for the pop tart highlights), and had to improvise the final 3 colors (red, black, grey) with markers.

Next, we needed a way to provide a guideline on the screen that we could follow. One resourceful developer found this pattern, brought the image up on Josh’s screen and used Lion’s fine-controlled zooming to match the square size to the same width as our small post-its. Perfect.

Finally we got to work with an X-ACTO knife, scissors, and a few late nights / early mornings. In the end, we covered the entire screen with everyone’s favorite rainbow-pooping pop tart cat!

Below are an in-progress shot, some shots of the finished product, poor Josh tearing it down square by square, sometimes getting stabbed by sharp corners under his fingernails, and finally the glue-covered screen with a reflection of Josh wincing at his bleeding fingertips. Muahaha.

Putting it together

The finished product

The de-construction begins

Josh's fingertips hurt from picking off all of the post-its

This is going to be much more than a how-to on Twitter and Facebook…. what Natalie will present is a comprehensive review of how companies are re-inventing themselves as a result of how social media is transforming the customer relationship. Not surprisingly we have a view on this… however as social media becomes more ingrained in the customer experience our view is not that radical or surprising.

Customer service, marketing, and commerce activities are coming together and creating new opportunities for companies to acquire new customers as well as get more out of the ones they already have. The latter point can’t be overstated and this forms the basis of the argument that customer service is marketing… which itself is not a new proposition as companies as diverse as Nordstrom’s and Avis have been differentiating themselves on the basis of customer service long before social media existed.

But here lies the rub, having a good customer service experience is not by itself equivalent to having a good customer experience and part of the challenge that Natalie’s course will unravel is how companies must reinvent their approach to customer engagement and employee empowerment as much as embrace social media technologies.

We had an interesting situation yesterday that caused me to consider how this plays out in real life. At Get Satisfaction we have defined some company values that we aspire to live up to and far from the highly polished company values statements that are expressed in pitch perfect Victorian English, our values are easily expressed and often find their way into our conversations… yesterday we considered “walk in your customer’s shoes” and “we got your back”.

Starting early in the morning yesterday we received calls and emails from people inquiring about a $1 charge on their credit cards… and not knowing anything about who we are or why we were charging them. After 5-6 of these calls I started looking into the details and could find no customer or transaction records for any of the people calling in, and a review of our credit card gateway records revealed no $1 transactions. Very quickly I came to the conclusion that we were not the source of these transactions and the working theory shifted to a malicious third party spoofing our merchant account to an unrelated payment gateway and using it to run credit card numbers through at low value authorizations to see what would work.

We had a choice to make at this point. The traditional company response would be to respond with as little detail as possible, essentially that “these transactions are not from us and you should contact your bank”. That is exactly what you or I would get if we were on the customer end of a call to pick-your-favorite-big-company. We, Caty Kobe and myself as we were primarily dealing with this, talked about how we would want to be treated and decided on a different strategy.

We contacted each person and asked for some additional information, which revealed a pattern in that the majority of people impacted lived in the Santa Cruz area and all the cards affected were debit cards, and then we shared everything we knew, what we had done, and what we were going to report to law enforcement. We also were explicit that they should contact their bank and cancel their card, as well as report fraud, and to give our name and contact information to the fraud departments so that we could share all the information we had. Basically we tried to be as empathetic as possible because credit card fraud is stress inducing, and to share all the information we had to remove any possibility that we were not doing our level best to help.

The response we received was positive and if I have one overall objective for managing this experience it would be that I would want each of the people we talked with yesterday to think about us in their next customer experience and say “I wish Company X was like those folks at Get Satisfaction”. No one told Caty and I how to handle this, we did not have to have a series of meetings about policy and procedure, we consulted with our on staff legal person about what we could do to stop the fraud but not about our response, and then we just did it.

If more companies declared their values in simple terms and then empowered people to actually live up to them then the world would be a much easier place. This is why you should attend Natalie’s class, it will prepare you to not just use social media in business but also introduce you to how your business will change as a result.

ATTENDEES WILL:

• Leave with a social business blueprint and know how to execute with social media applications and software
• Learn practical tips, techniques, and how to use social media monitoring to levelset where your social media program is
• Take an assessment to benchmark the “as is” state of your social media initiatives and compare them to “could be” via best practices
• Learn how to gear your initiatives to higher monetizations of social media investments
• Create strategies and tactical plans that make sense to traditional organizations (even those not familiar with social media)
• Learn how to use business cases and ROI to ease the approval process for initiatives and implementation simpler, more efficient, and effective because they are grounded in business fundamentals that maximize the ROI in social media.

All 3 features were identified and voted on by customers in the Get Satisfaction Draw Something community, which is now serving more than 100,000 dedicated community members and over 25 million pageviews this year thanks to the power of search referral and social network sharing:

Raising the 99 cap limit

Communicating between players

Pull down to refresh

Using Get Satisfaction for curating product ideas in your community works and what this means is that you will be able to build better products faster by connecting with your most engaged customers first.

Learn more by reading the book’s blog or just go ahead and order it today.

Get Lucky is a manual for serendipity: what it is, how it works, and how to put it to work for you.  The book talks about companies who have launched products as a result of accidental experiments (3M Post-it-notes) or have recognized changes that have opened up new markets that have taken their company to the next paradigm.

Check out the video interview with Thor on Triangulation and learn more about Get Lucky and how Thor and Lane started Get Satisfaction using many of the concepts outlined in the book.

I’ve been reading a research paper put out by Credit Suisse called The Apps Revolution Manifesto – Volume 1: The Technologies.

It’s a fascinating read, if you can get a copy I would encourage you to (I don’t believe I have distribution rights otherwise I would like a download copy myself). As I read it I am struck by 3 thoughts:

1) Credit Suisse’s thesis is, to paraphrase, that predictions of big on-premise app vendors deaths are premature. I tend to agree with this view… but with some important caveats.

2) We are upon yet another great app modernization cycle, but for me the question revolves around the winners and those that don’t win as much. The last upgrade cycle was CAPEX centric, this one is going to have it’s own healthy dose of CAPEX but not nearly as much as the last cycle, while OPEX spending will be greater and spread across a far more diverse market. This is the first caveat on my point #1, existing big application vendors are not well suited to thrive in this environment and it is unlikely to believe they will undergo a radical transformation to achieve these competencies.

3) The forcing event for the last cycle was Y2K, this one is being driven by mobile, social, and cloud-based big data. The last cycle easily translated into product sales cycle, this one does not. Mobile, social, and big data have product componentry but are more accurately described as a transformative business strategy rather than technology strategy.

I have made it through half of the document but one thing is eminently clear, a lot of old world acronyms are being swapped out with new terminology, vendor names, and market forces which are thrusting them into a central position for companies looking at the decade ahead and how they achieve and sustain competitive advantage.

At Get Satisfaction our mission from day one has been to help bring companies closer to their customers. Whether to answer customer support questions, get feedback on product features or drive brand advocacy, an open dialog with customers is key.  And we know that mobile is the fastest growing channel of consumer interaction, and our mobile solution is as intuitive and easy to use as our online customer engagement platform.

Thanks for the vote of confidence Lauren!

Read the whole post here.

Social business challenges us to tear down the high castle walls that separate employees from customers, and replace these walls with a new openness to pervasive customer involvement. By developing the skill of permeability we can allow ideas and experiences to flow in and out of our organizations, helping us adapt to a rapidly changing world.

But how exactly do we do this, and how do we quantify the value of this skill in our fast-moving companies? Tune in for this provocative and candid interview to find out.

Join Thor Muller, co-founder of Get Satisfaction and co-author of Get Lucky: How to Put Planned Serendipity to Work for You and Your Business, as he interviews Bill Johnston, the Director of Global Online Community at Dell. For over a decade, at Dell, Forum One and Autodesk, Bill has been creating and managing some of the most successful customer communities in the world. At each of his roles he has helped pioneer what it means to provide effective social support, social marketing and now social commerce.

Attendees will learn:

• How to find and develop brand evangelists
• How to uncover hidden customer needs to drive innovation
• How to meet the needs of different business stakeholders, while leaving room for serendipity
• What it means to have a successful community in a sales-driven/product-driven or customer-centric culture
• How to design effective programs that serve different community goals

But that’s not all: Five lucky attendees–chosen at random at the end of the webcast–will receive a free copy of Get Lucky: How to Put Planned Serendipity to Work for You and Your Business.

Click here to register for this free webcast.

Tuesday, April 3rd

11am PT

1 hour session

Serendipity is the set of positive outcomes that lie at the intersection of chance and creativity:

Serendipity = chance + creativity

Baked into this definition is our belief that you have agency when it comes to making your own luck—that you can significantly increase the amount of serendipity in your own life. When setting out to make that happen, it’s easy to assume that you can only affect the creativity part of that equation—that the hard work of being creative is the only way to increase your luck. This might seem daunting at first, but the good news is that you don’t have to be a creative genius to bring serendipity into your life. You have the ability to affect the chance part of the equation just as much.

Consider how most of us spend our workdays. We follow predictable patterns: we get up, eat breakfast, head to work, arrive at our desk, get some work done, maybe attend a few meetings, and go home around the same time every day. We work mostly with the same people, in the same place, and do much the same thing, day in and day out. That’s our work life, as we live it and as the companies we work in expect us to: consistently, reliably, necessarily routine.

If you’re trying to get lucky, however, routine can really get in the way. Doing the same thing, seeing the same people, experiencing the same environment without change—this is no recipe for accidentally encountering something new and important. As Charles Kettering, the American inventor responsible for, among other things, the modern electrical motor, leaded gasoline, the refrigerator, and air conditioning, once put it: “Keep on going and chances are you will stumble onto something, perhaps when you are least expecting it. I have never heard of anyone stumbling on something sitting down.”

What Kettering means when he says “keep on going” is what we refer to as motion, the most basic of the core skills of planned serendipity. Motion is the raw material of luck, and being in motion is the essential skill you need to develop to foster serendipity. We define “being in motion” as the act of putting yourself in unfamiliar situations, but within familiar environments. The key to this definition is “familiar environments”—putting yourself in motion is not about movement without purpose. We don’t mean just randomly dropping into any new situation but instead engaging with previously unfamiliar people and ideas that are connected to your job, your projects, or your interests. Being in motion is about greatly increasing the likelihood that you will encounter new experiences, opportunities, and information that are relevant to you and your work by actively inserting yourself into a new situation in which they might exist.

In short, motion is all about breaking out of routine by knowingly seeking out the unknown. By looking for new people, places, or experiences that are relevant but outside of your normal everyday activities you’re giving those experiences, opportunities, and information the chance to find you. Some of these will have value for you, and some won’t. The key is to put yourself in a position to expose yourself to them so that you can be the judge of what’s important to you and what isn’t (and there are ways to improve your judgment, too, but that’s a whole other skill).

This is the key benefit of motion—not the act of moving itself but instead the unexpected, creative collisions that are the natural result of being on the move. We move because we want to collide with new ideas, directions, and clues that are relevant to us, and we can’t do that if we never actually expose ourselves to environments and situations where these kinds of collisions might occur.

Getting Started with Motion

There are plenty of opportunities you can use to move more inside your work environment. Attending events and seminars put on by different departments in your organization, joining extracurricular activities where other employees are also participating, even sitting with new people in the cafeteria at lunch are all ways to bring a little motion into your day.

And yet, though they might sound easy, these activities can be challenging to implement consistently. We know from our own experiences in the corporate world how difficult it can be to achieve perpetual motion within an office environment. The siren song of our daily routine is powerful in its familiarity and comfort, and the idea of making time and space at work to experience the unknown can be more than a little intimidating. You have to put yourself directly in the path of the unfamiliar—people you don’t know, places you’re not normally in—which is never that easy. Not to mention that the goal of doing so is by definition fuzzy in the first place, since it’s never clear beforehand how these activities will benefit you or what kind of outcomes could result. This lack of clarity kills motivation. And besides, there’s all this other important—and familiar—everyday work to get done!

Though it can be difficult to get moving while plowing through the daily grind of work, there are some simple steps you can take to get started, beginning with getting yourself out of the office on a routine basis. Conferences in your area of expertise, collaborative meet-ups, seminars, networking events, or other smaller get-togethers with like-minded individuals are all terrific ways to put yourself in an unfamiliar situation within a familiar environment. Whether it’s an idea you get from a presentation by a colleague from another company or a conversation with a peer in the lobby outside, these activities may spark a new way of seeing things you hadn’t previously considered.

The more you can open up space in your schedule to attend new events as frequently as time allows, and to attend as wide a range as possible as opposed to just the same old conference circuit, the more likely you are to have exactly that serendipitous encounter you didn’t even know you needed. As with everything about motion, the more routinely you can break out of your regular routine, the luckier you get.

Pre-order the book today

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