Webware

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 descriptions that clarify exactly how and where the commenter thinks Thing X needs changing.

The company is quickly establishing partnerships with Fortune 500 companies, and is already working with WebEx to deliver feedback for webinars. The product also extrapolates to document reviews, PowerPoint presentations, and so on. You won't hear much about the product on the market, since FeedbackFX will mostly be selling solutions for other businesses to brand as their own.

GetSatisfaction bends the power of crowd-sourcing to customer support in a forum for reporting problems and offering solutions. We at CNET think it's a great idea (see previous coverage here and here,) especially the collaboration vibe. Users ask questions, reply, and rate other peoples' replies. "We make it easy for the companies to get involved," said Lane Becker, Get Satisfaction's President. "Ridiculously easy." Company representatives can jump onto the focused forum in real-time to give their customers better service than the tinny and antiseptic experience of most customer service calls.

What customers can do in on GetSatisfaction.com

It's also a great system for companies to answer a question once and to tap into a community of customers who are helping each other and sharing open dialog. The service's biggest plus? There's no annoying hold music.

Imagine if Facebook hadn't been built by Facebook. What if Facebook, MySpace, and Friendster all created the skeleton for their community by clicking boxes from the same Web site? HiveLive is doing something just that, acting as the conduit between a corporation and its cheery community network. HiveLive's platform lets companies choose the components of their sites, including setting permissions and facilitating online events like a mashup exchange or voting.

It's a good idea, the judges echoed, but not unique. Jive Software and Ning (video) one of the five or six other enterprise software solutions referenced in the space.

"Geek Squad is a stone-age call center with a Web site," said Yair Grindlinger, whose tech support network SupportSpace (see previous coverage,) brings together working technicians ("independent experts") with people who need their help. Search is a main feature on the site, as are Yelp-like features for leaving comments and reviews, and bookmarking favorite techs. Live tech support is a big draw for users, as is the pricing structure, paid either by the minute or by session. Keep in mind that users won't be paying for time spent in lengthy queues.

Like the judges, I'm a little wary of the undefined certification process that the techs (mostly college grads and moms who need flexible work schedules, said Grindlinger) go through before they can collect cash and remote-access into your computer, but user ratings help mitigate dodgy agents. That gives rise to the other problem--how to keep a service like this keep from becoming a Digg-like popularity play, where the techs who succeed are those who have already succeeded.

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.

(Credit: Satisfaction Unlimited)

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.

Get Satisfaction Unlimited sounds like a 1) the album Barry White never finished or 2) the name of a Jean Claude Van Damme movie in which someone gets their head lopped off by a helicopter blade. At a minimum, they should have included a few exclamation points (Unlimited!!!) on the end.

"It's a new take on customer service," company Chief Executive Thor Muller told VentureWire. "Customers are at the center and can help each other. It's a community sourcing platform where questions can be asked, problems can be solved and ideas can be shared."

The publication does not report whether Thor (if that is his real name) was wearing a shirt or not.

The name seems to change quite a bit too. Although VentureWire has it down as Get Satisfaction Unlimited, the site lists the company as Satisfaction, Satisfaction Unlimited, and Satisfaction! (Finally, they wise up and go for exclamations.) BusinessWeek described it as Get Satisfaction.

Get Satisfaction now joins my hall of crazy company names. Some are good (Hyperactive Technologies, Dress Barn) and some are a bit crazy (Internet Gold Golden Lines, Central European Media Enterprises, Hurray Holding and Wackenhut Security). And let's not forget the game controller, the TrustMaster!

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 of using (or in addition to) the more traditional blog-based talkback mechanism. One big advantage is that Tangler is real-time, like a chat room. But it archives like a discussion thread. An embedded Tangler-like discussion can make a hot post feel even more lively. See samples of an embedded discussion here.

A Tangler thread, embedded in a blog.

(Credit: Tangler)

Initially, Tangler was built as a destination site for discussions, and it still works as such. One of the advantages of this architecture is that since Tangler's database is centralized there's (so far) just one log-in for the entire system. So if you're talking on one blog that's using Tangler and then participate on another that is as well, you'll be able to see all your active discussions on Tangler.com. How that's going to square with sites that already have a registration or login system isn't yet clear, although people have talked about using OpenID with Tangler.

Another cool feature: A desktop application that pops up whenever a thread you're participating in is updated. I love this idea. I sure wouldn't want an app for each blog I comment on, but one that covers them all would be great.

The Tangler team still has some work to do before its embedded discussion system will be palatable to publishers. The Tangler branding is a bit heavy, and the discussion window feels like a widget, not an integral part of the sites it's on. Tangler is working on "white label" versions as well as APIs, which should give publishers more flexibility.

Other options: CoComment and Satisfaction

There are other ways to handle discussion overload. CoComment (review), for example, is designed to work alongside existing community feedback systems and keep track of all your discussions. That's harder to do--it requires technology that can intercept data going to various blogs--but it does not require that the blog publishers make any changes. (CoComment has some technical issues, unfortunately, and if you're curious about it, I recommend waiting a while so the team can make it faster and more reliable.)

Other services, like the upcoming Satisfaction (review), are also trying to help users manage their community feedback. Satisfaction has a unique focus on consumer-to-consumer customer support, but the idea is similar: Give site managers a tool for adding community, and give users a place to collate all the community activity they're engaged in.

More established community companies like Jive Software (CNET is a customer) continue to make ever more capable community products for site managers, without trying to skim their users' eyeballs and pop them over to their own site. One might say that the Jive model is more publisher-friendly. As a publisher, I really want my community to be mine, after all.

But I believe we will discover that the newer model is more powerful. As I said, media is fragmenting and so is our attention. From my perspective as a just another Web user (Excepting Webware, I read a lot and comment a little), having one place to track all my discussions would be a big help, and it would likely encourage me to visit even more frequently the sites and blogs I engage with.

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 to the Web for support from each other. But customer-to-customer support could be better, too. Web forums, the typical venue for user-to-user support, aren't as easy to use as they could be. Messages and topics get lost, know-it-alls dominate some discussions, and newbie users often have to be up on the concept of forums to take advantage of them to begin with.

Satisfaction is taking a swipe at this problem. Check out getsatisfaction.com/Pownce for an active example of the system applied to Pownce (or go here for more companies). You can see that search is front and center. Also, topics are broken out into questions, ideas, and problems.

Satisfaction: User forums 2.0

Users can rate replies, add their own, and subscribe to discussions (although for the a general audience there should be an easier way to sign up to receive updates on a topic). You also rate responses by "how it makes you feel," which is an interesting new take on ranking user-generated content. The "satisfactometer" will be used to surface the best comments and users, I gather, although there are also ways to more simply flag posts as "useful."

How does it make you feel?

(Credit: CNET Networks)

And this is very nice: users get their own "dashboard" that tracks their topics across companies. So, assuming Satisfaction takes off, we'll be able to keep up with our user-to-user conversations in one place, instead of trying to follow discussions on multiple services (with multiple log-ins and user interfaces). That's important, because Satisfaction is for more than just problem solving, and people might use the service more frequently than they do today's troubleshooting-based forums. Satisfaction has made a good place to discuss broader issues around a product, and, I can imagine, to talk with product managers and designers and engineers who could probably use a better way to connect with users.

While the service is still being built, it's already clear that Satisfaction does a better job of building a town square around a product or company than most other company-sponsored forums do. The design is approachable, and the social tools on the site make sense. It feels more like a site for users than for the companies who make the products, which, of course, is better for the customers and the companies.

Satisfaction reps told me they are "quietly testing the service" now, which means don't be surprised if the servers collapse while they are scaling up the business.

See also: Fixya (review).