Consumers are not in a research mode when they’re on Facebook. Instead, the first place they go to find out about a product is Google or the company web site.

That’s according to an internal study by GetSatisfaction, which found that close to 90% of customers go to a company’s website to research products or services. That’s compared to the 12% who use social networks to research brands and product details.

Get Satisfaction develops branded customer communities. And so yes, the study is a bit self serving. To be fair, CEO Wendy Lea said the company had originally done the research to guide further product development. Only later did they decide to release the results to the public.

The study does highlight the complexities and subtleties of today’s customer service environment. Companies increasingly need to think of the way they work with customers to provide a great experience. That may come down to using branded communities as much as thinking about the new generation of virtual assistants that respond to voice requests.

Get Satisfaction surveyed 2,000 people for the study. Here’s some of what they found:

• People want information on the brand web site that is from consumers who go there to talk about the products or services. They do not want a stream from a branded Facebook page.
• About 32% of consumers say these branded customer communities are the best way to get information fast.
• In a branded community, 82.6% of customers surveyed said they would advocate for that company’s products or services, and more than 50% of them would do it for free.

These results make sense from a research perspective and shows the symbiotic relationship between the search sites, brands and social communities.

People want more than one place to get information. It has to be relevant to the way we live and work. People also get influenced by their friends and peers. If a trusted colleague is talking on Twitter about a great app, it is more likely that I will check it out. But if I am researching to buy a car, I am not going to go to Facebook to look into it.

Instead, we are in a time where we want to get information as quickly as possible. Calling a toll-free number is the last thing I want to do when my cable modem is not connecting to the Internet. But talking to someone on the phone may be just what I want when trying to figure out travel logistics.

In the research, Get Satisfaction finds the need for branded communities but the advent of mobile devices is not explored in any depth.

Mobile device will drive the direction of customer service. People can easily use apps to get their questions answered. As Opus Research points out, smartphone apps can offer more functionality and a potentially better experience than web sites.

Combining the power of the cloud with apps that foster branded communities should also be considered by companies interested in the next generation of customer service.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Customer support startup Get Satisfaction is partnering with social marketing company Involver today to update its Facebook app to become more customer-friendly. Get Satisfaction’s Facebook app, which launched last year, adds a customer support tab for a brand’s Fan Page.

Customers can begin wall discussions in the form of four topic types: Ask a Question, Share an Idea, Report a Problem, or Give Praise. When customers begin to post a question, Get Satisfaction searches for and suggests similar threads to give consumers instant answers to commonly asked questions.

The company says that Get Satisfaction for Facebook is used by more than 600 companies and organization, including Proter and Gamble, Flipboard, and Gilt Groupe.

Unfortunately, the application wasn’t able to import support questions on the Facebook Fan Page into the company’s existing Get Satisfaction community on the web. Today, Get Satisfaction is partnering with Involver to integrate the Facebook Wall with a company’s existing Get Satisfaction community, allowing support agents to import Wall conversations directly into the community for discussion and resolution. The updated Facebook app will collect and organize all the social knowledge (questions, feedback, concerns, and praise) found on the Facebook into a company’s Get Satisfaction web based community.

So why is this a big deal? It helps companies transform Facebook Fan page requests into actionable information within the Get Satisfaction community. And the fact is that some support agents would rather not conduct these conversations on Facebook itself, but rather within the support community.Get Satisfaction CEO Wendy Lea says that this was one of the top requests from customers.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Who is the “social consumer”, the consumer who shops with social intelligence and their social graph?  Here’s a useful updated infographic from GetSatisfaction on the subject…

Article courtesy of Social Commerce Today

Customer support startup Get Satisfaction has raised $6 million in Series A funding led by Azure Capital Partners with O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and First Round Capital participating in the round. The company previously raised $2.3 million in seed funding from investors including SoftTech VC, FreeStyle Capital, and Kapor Capital.

Founded in 2007, Get Satisfaction develops and operates a network of customer support forums where customers can post their own questions, ideas, problems, or conversations about a product. Companies can also claim their board and put their own employees on to moderate the boards. Zappos, Foursquare, Twitter, Mint.com and Nike have all created customer support communities on the site. Currently there are over 40,000 communities that have been created on the Get Satisfaction platform.

More recently, Get Satisfaction has been tapping into the customer conversations taking place on social media sites. In 2008, the startup ear to Twitter to help its clients monitor Twitter for mentions of brands.

And earlier this year, Get Satisfaction launched a customer support tan for a brand’s Fan Page. Customers can begin wall discussions in the form of four topic types: Ask a Question, Share an Idea, Report a Problem, or Give Praise. When customers begin to post a question, Get Satisfaction searches for and suggests similar threads to give consumers instant answers to commonly asked questions. All questions, comments, and answers are discoverable via Google and other search engine. People can respond to any thread — i.e. voice a similar problem, suggest a remedy, emerge as an advocate in response to another’s complaint, or offer a new twist to a product suggestion. Community members can also make their experience heard by simply clicking ‘me too’. In turn, any question, idea or problem posted on a brand’s hub on Facebook will be automatically imported into the brand’s Get Satisfaction web interface, allowing marketers and customer support reps to access the conversation from their Get Satisfaction site.

The Get Satisfaction platform also connects with existing enterprise tools (such as Salesforce.com and Zendesk) to make CRM offerings, help desks, and other back-office solutions smarter. With the new funding, Get Satisfaction will invest in its team, product development, marketing, as well as focus on building partnerships with digital agencies, CRM providers, and distribution partners.

Over the past year, the company has also gone through a leadership transition. In August, co-founder Lane Becker stepped down as President of the company. And Wendy Lea took over for co-founder Thor Muller in early 2009 as CEO (Muller stepped into the CTO role). Today, the company has added Jeff Nolan as VP of Product Marketing and Tony Pribyl as Director of Strategic Partnerships.

The company has also revealed a new mascot (pictured here)-his name is JarGon the customer service robot (and our nemesis). According to Muller: JarGon is the customer service robot. He has no heart and isn’t capable of love. He was created in a secret lab to frustrate customers, and Get Satisfaction is locked in an epic battle to protect the populace from this bumbling, metallic menace.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Get Satisfaction has a goal of satisfying users of various services across the web by connecting them with people who actually work for those services. But are they themselves satisfied? Yes, according to co-founder Lane Becker. Though you’ll forgive our slight skepticism as Becker is saying that on his way out the door.

Becker, who co-founded the service alongside Thor and Amy Muller, has stepped down as President of the company, we’ve learned and confirmed with Becker. Becker says that the move is “all good and positive” and notes that the reason for the move is that the company is “doing well enough that i can afford to take a break.“

He says he has no plans for what he’ll do next just yet.

When asked who will replace him as President of the company, Becker says that no one is and joked that’s because he is “irreplaceable.” But he reiterated that the strong management team they’ve built out is one of the reasons why he feels okay stepping back.

That team includes CEO Wendy Lea who took over for co-founder Thor Muller in early 2009 (Muller stepped into the CTO role). The service raised a new round of funding earlier this year that likely totaled between $2 and $3 million, so they should be doing fine money-wise.

Still there’s some concern out there that Google or even Twitter (a longtime Get Satisfaction user) or Quora might step in to compete with the company. Speaking of Quora, there seems to be some discontent among users and potential clients of Get Satisfaction there — some pricing changes earlier this year likely didn’t help that.

So we’ll believe Becker for now that everything is just fine and he just wants to take a break. But someone feel free to raise this question in Get Satisfaction.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch