satisfaction

Under the Radar: Apps that say, 'The customer is always right'

The Rolling Stones were wrong. Sometimes you can get satisfaction. These four companies, presented at Under the Radar, offer Web apps for users to get, ask for, and give feedback better.

FeedbackFX puts a spin on the usual way people provide feedback to businesses--usually via e-mail, online or paper forms, or in-person focus groups. The screen shots in the demo show FeedbackFX as a slick media player, and gives users a lot more wiggle room to review multimedia content like video and designs directly on the media itself, in the exact location under review. This saves time writing up detailed … Read more

Crazy company name alert: Get Satisfaction Unlimited

Sometimes, you can just be too direct.

VentureWire announced today that a company called Get Satisfaction Unlimited, which provides a forum for consumers to discuss customer service issues, has secured $1.3 million in funding from First Round Capital, O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and a group of individual investors.

It's a great idea. But there are probably a lot of names that wouldn't make a 13-year old laugh. Kvetch.com, Alwaysright.com, Whining Old Ladies. If I were a naming consultant, popping off those three would probably net me $50,000. Not bad for 45 seconds of labor. … Read more

Is out, er, "crowdsourcing" of support possible?

Tim O'Reilly writes glowingly about O'Reilly Alpha Tech Ventures' latest investment in Satisfaction. It's kind of a dumb name for a company (sounds more like an adult novelty store than a customer-support site), but the premise behind the company is interesting, though I'm not yet sure how practical:

Satisfaction is people-powered customer service for everything. It's a Web service that uses "community-sourcing" to provide better support for products and services, with or without company involvement. Satisfaction's open discussion-based system allows companies, their customers and partners to work together to answer questions, identify problems and bugs, share great ideas for how to make products better, and connect in unexpected ways.

It sounds like a reasonable way to harness the web-based support that already happens around companies, both open- and closed-source alike. But will it work? And do we want it to?… Read more

"Your call is very important to us..."

No, it's not. If it were I wouldn't still be on hold for 43 minutes. And if I were so important I wouldn't be speaking to a know-nothing idiot from God knows where, who doesn't even understand my question.

Lets face it, customer service can be a cruel joke. And sure, there are exceptions. I was truly impressed with Lexicon's staff; their tech crew was absolutely top notch and I didn't have to punch my way through an automated phone directory hell to get to the right person. Lexicon is a high-end audio manufacturer; … Read more

Nikon tops SLR customer satisfaction survey

Update 11:25 a.m. PDT: Some folks seem confused about what exactly J.D. Power and Associates is measuring, so I've added some more detail about the study and about Sony's rating.

Well, this news isn't going to go over well at Canon.

According to a new survey by J.D. Power and Associates, Nikon is the clear leader in customer satisfaction among digital SLR (single-lens reflex) customers in the United States. Adding insult to injury, SLR newcomer Sony came in second.

The survey doesn't measure product quality, but rather how happy more than 7,… Read more

Tangler: Profiting from the distraction economy

The fragmenting online media world is leading to a world of fragmented online communities, too. More people are participating in discussions on blogs, and on social sites like MySpace and Facebook. And it's becoming impossible to keep up with all of it. Tangler, which we've covered before, is now in beta and addresses this issue. I thought it'd be good to look at this solution and how it compares to some others.

Tangler is building an embeddable discussion system. Later this month, site publishers will be able to embed a Tangler thread widget onto any post, instead … Read more

Satisfaction is smart, crowd-sourced support

The team from Satisfaction had a demo table at the Stirr event last night. Satisfaction reps were showing off their new system for "people-powered customer service."

I'm all over this one. Because most product support and service just stinks. On everything from washing machines to software, the experience you're going to get from a company is highly variable. You might get a dolt reading from a script. You might get the engineer who built the thing. And you might wait on hold for 45 minutes before you get anyone. That's why customers have been flocking … Read more

T-Mobile wins again

T-Mobile has done it again: J.D. Power and Associates recently ranked the carrier as No. 1, for the fifth time in a row, for providing the highest level of overall customer satisfaction. J.D. Power's 2007 Wireless Regional Customer Satisfaction Index found that T-Mobile ranks ahead of Cingular/AT&T, Alltel, U.S. Cellular, Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel in three of six regions surveyed: the Northeast, the West and the Southwest. In the Mid-Atlantic area, T-Mobile tied with Verizon, and in the Southeast, the carrier tied with Alltel. There was a four-way tie in the North … Read more