"The first sign of success is when your existing customer base signs up for your new solution." Scott Hirsch, the vice president of product marketing at Get Satisfaction, is happy to say that they've been experiencing just that feeling since the launch of their new product, Get Satisfaction for Small Business.
Get Satisfaction is an SaaS platform that integrates into a company's existing website, creating communities for "social support, social marketing, and customer feedback." While they have over 70,000 customer communities, small businesses were lacking in options normally available to larger customers due to the pricing structure being based on features. Now with the Small Business plan the platforms have the same functionality and pay per seat (large businesses have the same features but more customization options). Hirsch has been with Get Satisfaction since its beginning in 2007 and said, "A small business solution has been in the works ever since we were founded."
Get Satisfaction focuses on the community managers as the primary audience for this offering. To that end, there are three primary features to appeal to prospective customers:
- A "Getting Started" app that helps community managers become acquainted with all of the functionality Get Satisfaction brings, including "setting up the community, seeding it with relevant content, and inviting customers to join";
- Integration with Facebook and Hootsuite (with whom they worked closely), since community managers tend to focus on social media in addition to their communities;
- Community Health Analytics, one of its most popular points and a way to gauge the vitality of communities by measuring how self-organizing it is, how many topics are created, which customers are most engaged, etc.
Because Get Satisfaction and all of their customers' communities are hosted by them, customers receive a bump with SEO as well. Hirsch demonstrated a search for "fair trade" and "Mighty Leaf Tea" that resulted in the #2 result on Google with the very SEO-friendly link: https://getsatisfaction.com/mightyleaf/topics/do_you_have_any_free_trade_tea.
Hirsch also mentioned the minimum efficiency improvements customers saw was at least 15% and tended to average between 35-40% after fully integrating Get Satisfaction. Ultimately, he said, small businesses have a lot to gain from having better relationships with their customers "as a point of differentiation, and as a way to provide amazing customer service."
Wendy Lea, CEO of Get Satisfaction, said "By fostering customer-to-customer interactions, community managers bring tremendous business value to multiple departments across their company-lowering support costs, bringing better products to market, and acquiring new customers." Hirsch went on to say, "Social media and customer community are two of the key ways to provide [customer service], and oh, by the way, those two things are relatively inexpensive. A company of any size should have a community to engage with their customers about what they care about."