booktwo.org

It’s rare that I out-and-out praise a service, particularly here, but if you’re running any kind of customer-facing service on the web I can’t recommend Get Satisfaction highly enough. In fact, if you’re not using it, you’re doing it wrong: it’s up there in a select set of absolutely essential tools like Google Analytics, Feedburner and Campaign Monitor (or equivalents, but they’re my picks) that should be set up and running for your project / website / shop before they launch.

Get Satisfaction is “people-powered customer service” that provides a trackable single point of contact, organisation, reference, feedback and ongoing management of customers for your product. It does it in a properly 2.0 way too: it’s free, with email notifications, RSS feeds, transparency and good design.

I’ve been using it from the start for Bookkake (which hasn’t done much, but glad to have it) and more especially for bkkeepr, where it has proved invaluable, particularly as the service is fairly hands-off most of the time. I get notifications of issues before I’ve noticed them, technical advice on upgrades, and even great tips on how to improve the service, some of which I’ve actually implemented. And where I haven’t implemented them, I can explain why, and keep those ideas in an easy-accessible place. This kind of dialogue with your users is pretty much essential.

There are nice extras features too, like monitoring Twitter for you – which you can do with Twitter search as well, but essential for a product like bkkeepr, and a good idea for pretty much any web-based product these days (along with Google Alerts). And the new Feedback tab – which isn’t for everyone, but fits in really well on bkkeepr – is a truly excellent invention, a brilliant execution which keeps users on your site while they give you feedback, and has produced a very noticeable increase in useful contributions from users.

So thanks to all the wonderful bkkeepr users who have contributed via Get Satisfaction. Sorry I haven’t implemented all the ideas, but the feedback has been invaluable, and all ideas are considered. If you have a similar site, or anywhere where users spend more time interacting your site than you do – which is pretty much everyone – you should be using it too.