New customer service site Get Satisfaction, itself a wonder to behold, announced today that it is now accepting requests for access to a beta API (Application Programming Interface). Satisfaction functionality will soon be available for apps and sites all over the web. Fresh off of a successful conference titled "Customer Service is the New Marketing," Get Satisfaction is becoming the hippest place for companies to engage transparently with their customers - whether they want to or not!
Have complaints about the products and services at Twitter? Join the club - at Get Satisfaction! More old-school than that, a user of HP's photosharing service Snapfish, perhaps? You too can vent your gripes with the cool kids at Get Satisfaction. These are just two of a wide range of companies that have chosen to answer questions and complaints publicly on this website.
More than just a question and answer service, Get Satisfaction includes a bunch of smart, fun and helpful features.
Companies can opt-in to participating and be identified explicitly in conversations. Customers can signal that they share some one else's problem or question and get an email if it is answered.
To learn more about the thinking behind Get Satisfaction, check out this October interview with CEO Thor Muller at SocialMediaToday.
"Get Satisfaction is superclose," the company wrote tonight, "to releasing a RESTful API (including some very cool OAuth support) through which you can access almost all of our current features and functionality." They've already offer the ability for customers to broadcast their questions and complaints out onto Twitter or Facebook, and for companies to stick a Satisfaction RSS widget on their websites. What on earth could come next? Satisfaction has the ear of some of the most cutting edge Web 2.0 heads online, so there's probably some very interesting stuff on the way.
OAuth support means you'll be able to access user data on a wide variety of other systems, including most if not all that support OpenSocial, without asking for username and password.
Does that mean we'll be seeing the option to shoot your complaint thread about a company out to all your friends on MySpace or GMail? I wonder how many of the company's absent today will be showing up soon, post-API.
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What a wonderful development and thank god. After my husband's ordeal with Symantec the other night and my frustration with Verizon I'm happy to learn there will soon be a better way...
Posted by: kathleen mazzocco | February 6, 2008 6:15 PMGreat post - Get Satisfaction has a great idea, they solve so many problems for companies - bringing what was a maybe non-existent customer service department online, creating a 'knowledge base' of common questions and letting companies really interact with their 'people'. It's a viable business model - what SMB wouldn't want to use this platform? We picked them to present at Under the Radar (http://undertheradarblog.com) in March, they're going to be one to watch in 2008.
Posted by: shay | February 6, 2008 7:06 PMHello World,
Just so you know who to complain to, I wrote the Satisfaction API (although the wonderful Leonard Richardson, who wrote O'Reilly's RESTful Web Services, contributed heavily to the initial design and Ezra Cooper gave tons of feedback). It's a pretty big API, given that one of our goals was to allow developers who were so inclined to re-create the entire Satisfaction app on their own. Given its size, I'm sure there are things missing that would be very useful for application developers, and I'm very excited to hear about ideas for improvement.
All that said, there are even things in the current incarnation of getsatisfaction.com that will be missing from this initial round of the API, but never fear they will all show up eventually.
Posted by: Scott Fleckenstein | February 6, 2008 9:05 PMThor and his team have done a great job putting this app together. The API is clearly the next step to gaining access to the mainstream customer service conversation.
Posted by: Chuck | February 7, 2008 7:43 AMWonder if we'll see any companies using this API to hit Get Satisfaction to see if the client they are talking to on the phone is active on the site and then (hopefully) bumping up their service. Could see this being used in a Salesforce call center application.
Posted by: Joe Fernandez | February 7, 2008 1:33 PM