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Offer a private version of Get Satisfaction
Is there any way to make a get satisfaction company private as our customers desire to not share their information or problems with the public at large?
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Josef: We're a very public place. Part of our core focus is on transparency and openness. We will probably include a way for companies and customers to share sensitive information like account numbers and e-mail addresses, but we don't have plans for a fully private version of Get Satisfaction. We're unlike traditional forums in this respect, but we think the advantages you get from openness can lead to better and more authentic interactions between customers and the companies that serve them.
I’m hoping this helps
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Hi guys. As we've mentioned, while we don't have a private version, we can keep your company private -- as Lane says, it's security through obscurity. So it's not password protected or anything like that.
Just email info[at]getsatisfaction[dot]com and Eric or I will help you out with it. Basically, every company that gets added to GS is "private" until we manually make it "public". This is to prevent spam sites, inappropriate content, etc from getting into our search results and activity stream. So if you let us know that you want your area to remain "private" for now we'll just make a note to leave it as such.
This works well for companies who are in a private beta and want to have "private" conversations with their community members but not announce anything to the public at large. However, the assumption here is also that at some point you will have a public launch and at that point make your Get Satisfaction community public as well. I'm not sure I'd recommend this "hack" for a permanent private community solution.
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My argument for private sections or access management would be the following:
In most companies there are may be two dialogs: The external one (e.g.: the company with the public - this is the dialog that Get Satisfaction handles) and the internal dialog *within* the company (e.g.: between employees).
We have found Get Satisfaction an extremely useful tool in providing support to our customers - it would be great to be able to offer the same type of support and discussion internally using the same tool (that we have tried and tested and are happy with).
Obviously such internal conversations (perhaps about technical issues, or new features etc) cannot be public on the internet - however; providing the kind of openness and accountability that a system like get satisfaction provides *within* our company would be a big win.
Furthermore, if we were able to facilitate our internal employee dialog in the same place that we communicate with our external users, this would go a long way in aligning internal decisions with external feedback as well as improving employee activity in the public forum.
I know there are plenty of tools out there that we *could* use, however, Get Satisfaction is a tool that *is* working for us, and *could* work for us internally without us needing to add *Yet Another Tool* to our already dauntingly large list of tools ...
Finally: surely it wouldn't be *that* hard to simply allow a private area with access limited to users of certain roles (e.g.: Employee or maybe Champ). You already have implemented Roles as it is :^)
I’m really keen to see this feature
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Is it possible to add a company/product but not public? I want to add a company/product just for the employees. We have a product and we want just the employees to give us some feedback about this.
This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled
Is it possible to add a private product?.
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I am currently evaluating tools for collecting and managing customer and employee feedback for the B2B web application company I work for, and I would love to recommend we purchase GS, but cannot due to the lack of access control. We require a private forum for the following reasons:
- We are not willing to broadcast our community's ideas and our company's development plan to our competitors.
- We need one solution that will allow us to capture internal notes with community posts that are not visible to users who are not employees.
- We need to collect feedback from a small user group for beta features.
I understand GS's commitment to openness and transparency, but don't see how acknowledging that their are legitimate business needs for controlling access to conversations between a company and their customers would undermine this commitment. As people become more comfortable with having some of these conversations more publically, the need for access control will likely decrease, but it won't disappear altogether. And in the meantime, GS is losing customers that would love to start paying them. Since this thread is over a year old and nothing has been implemented to address this need, I have to assume that it is not a priority for GS and I will have to recommend a different solution. That's very disappointing.
I've been a fan of Adaptive Path and its alumni since I attended the launch party in SF shortly after working on a project with Indi Young, so was immediately interested in GS when I saw Lane was involved. I also very much enjoyed Thor's presentation at WebVisions a few weeks ago. I'm sure that GS is going to continue to improve, and I wish you luck with it. From my perspective, though, a little less ideology and a little more support for B2B business requirements would lead us all to a lot more happy customers (and business analysts/ux designers)!
I’m disappointed
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We think that having a private forum would be extremely useful for developers working with their beta-testers on discussing a private beta release of software.
Once the software is in public beta, then the conversation could continue in public with the general user base.
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Perhaps it would be an idea to have different types of 'conversations' - you can choose to have a public conversation or a private conversation.
By default - and without choice at the moment - all of the conversations on Get Satisfaction are public. The transparency issue is an important one, so perhaps my proposal would help this:
You can start a private conversation and it can remain private for all time. At a point in the future, you can decide - when a product comes out of private beta, or an NDA is lifted - to make private conversations public.
However, once a conversation is public - either because it was public to start with, or was made public via the process outlined above - it can never be made private again. This would ensure that openness and transparency is maintained.
I’m confident that this would be considered a good option
3 people think
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private option would be great - I mean everything visible to customers of software but not everyone on the internet.
I'm developer of website with limited access (paid service), I would like to use getsatisfaction as support place but e.g. data which is displayed to our customers can't be shared in public... but it is necessary to include data example when writing about bug or feature.
I’m hoping this will be impemented
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Eric: I understand the focus on transparency and openness. However, there is a need to be transparent and open among our customers, but not the public at large. The goal is to protect the sensitive nature of our customer's exchanges with each other while using your very very cool tool :-)
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Inappropriate?Josef: We're a very public place. Part of our core focus is on transparency and openness. We will probably include a way for companies and customers to share sensitive information like account numbers and e-mail addresses, but we don't have plans for a fully private version of Get Satisfaction. We're unlike traditional forums in this respect, but we think the advantages you get from openness can lead to better and more authentic interactions between customers and the companies that serve them.
I’m hoping this helps
3 people think
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Inappropriate?Eric: I understand the focus on transparency and openness. However, there is a need to be transparent and open among our customers, but not the public at large. The goal is to protect the sensitive nature of our customer's exchanges with each other while using your very very cool tool :-)
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Inappropriate?That's a good point, Josef, and one we'll certainly take into consideration as we plan and implement our ongoing feature enhancements. We already are considering the needs for passing private information between a customer and a company (e.g. account information), but you're suggesting something else--whole discussions that are only viewable by the company and other customers. We aren't inclined to make whole companies "private," but allowing the author of a topic to share it in a more limited way is worth discussing.
I’m open
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Inappropriate?FWIW, I'm involved with a company which has a similar need. In this case the info is health related - which immediately sets off alarm bells for everyone as you can imagine. The company would like your great support tools, but their customers would prefer to mask the information that they're even involved at the site.
Oh, and the company is still in early alpha stage, so everyone involved is also under NDA.
I guess this isn't the tool for them yet, but maybe later ...
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Inappropriate?@mm2001: I hear you. GetSat is such an intuitively easy to use tool, but declaring "GetSat is only transparent" seems to be eliminating a market entirely - namely any market where security and privacy is concerned. In my case, however, we work with law enforcement. They do not under any circumstances want their private conversations re: our services to be available to the public as it could negatively impact an investigation and endanger lives.
So yes...GetSat - please offer an privately installable product and we will buy :)
<end></end>
I’m a little tongue in cheek - but sorta serious
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Inappropriate?We hear you! While I don't think we'll do a privately installable product, we are willing to consider private areas. We started with a completely open system, and we're learning that there are a wide variety of uses that may call for access control.
It's not going to be here in the next couple months, but we'll let you know if and when we will support these kinds of needs.
Thanks for the feedback.
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This reply was removed on 10/04/08.
see the change log -
Inappropriate?Ah, my post was confusing. Let me insert names and try again.
Company H wants support software like GS. Sally belongs to Company H's website and needs support, but doesn't wish anyone to know that she's at Company H at all.
But in the end, this sounds very very similar to Josef's need. Law enforcement and healthcare both have strong needs both for great customer support, but also high privacy within the community.
They could actually consider a hosted solution vs privately installable (one less set of of servers to keep running and no updates to apply!), but the hosting service would likely have to bite off HIPAA compliance at the same time, which can be a pain! (And then there's single signon, etc., etc.!) :-) -
Inappropriate?private option would be great - I mean everything visible to customers of software but not everyone on the internet.
I'm developer of website with limited access (paid service), I would like to use getsatisfaction as support place but e.g. data which is displayed to our customers can't be shared in public... but it is necessary to include data example when writing about bug or feature.
I’m hoping this will be impemented
4 people think
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Inappropriate?Perhaps it would be an idea to have different types of 'conversations' - you can choose to have a public conversation or a private conversation.
By default - and without choice at the moment - all of the conversations on Get Satisfaction are public. The transparency issue is an important one, so perhaps my proposal would help this:
You can start a private conversation and it can remain private for all time. At a point in the future, you can decide - when a product comes out of private beta, or an NDA is lifted - to make private conversations public.
However, once a conversation is public - either because it was public to start with, or was made public via the process outlined above - it can never be made private again. This would ensure that openness and transparency is maintained.
I’m confident that this would be considered a good option
3 people think
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Yes, we are indeed looking at options that are similar to this. Smart! -
Inappropriate?I agree with setting discussions or whatever to private... which I see you have elected to do from the user side. However, admin needs to be able to do this too. While our KB etc. will be completely transparent, I know - based on experience with previous sites we have owned and operated - that someone will post in our Get Sat with some sort of billing question and probably include their password etc. So we need to be able to immediately make this discussion private to protect the privacy of that customer.
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well, we won't have private posting for a while still, but very very soon we'll be offering companies the ability to delete topics and replies, so you'll at least be able to remove that content as soon as it appears.
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Is there a timeline for this release?
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Yes. Look for it in the coming days.
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Can I suggest as opposed to an outright delete, admin also has the ability to turn that discussion private?
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that is the plan, but until we've got private messaging built, with "turn to private" as part of it, delete is the stopgap measure.
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Isn't private messaging handled by 'post it privately'?
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Using the Feedback Widget, yes. On our site, no.
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Nope! "Post it privately" via the Feedback widget actually emails the comment to you instead of posting it into Get Satisfaction. Private messaging will actually create a private company-to-customer topic within Get Satisfaction that a customer can use to communicate with an entire company (which will also become an option in the Feedback widget, instead of emailing.)
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Is there a timeline on the private messaging piece?
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"Soon." Private messaging is a priority for us, but I can't give you an exact timeline yet. I can tell you that if we don't have it by the end of the year I'll be pretty disappointed, though. :)
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Inappropriate?I would ask for a similar feature as I work in a department that builds web-sites for external use based mostly on internal feedback from other depts.
I’m unsure
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Inappropriate?A company who uses GetSatisaction for garnering ideas etc is undoubtedly a great source of competitive intelligence for rival companies. As a customer, fine, it's a decent idea that I have used quite a lot but if I had a company, would I want all and sundry know what products I am planning? No way, Jose.
I’m like, whatever. . .
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I completely agree with you Noel!! Not only rivals getting an edge without having to work very hard, it would almost be like emailing them every time I have an idea, but I've found some customers are very creeped out about being so open!! Don't get me wrong I love everything about get satisfaction and the openness, but a lot of my customers are very wary about all things internet. It's not so much they care that their comments are being read, just that if we as a company broadcast that info, what else are we broadcasting!
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Inappropriate?We think that having a private forum would be extremely useful for developers working with their beta-testers on discussing a private beta release of software.
Once the software is in public beta, then the conversation could continue in public with the general user base.
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Thanks for the feedback!
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well, here's what we can do right now: we can keep a company hidden, where we keep the company out of the public search. this means the only people who can access it are those who go directly through the URL. security through obscurity. we have some other companies that use it to beta test their products that way. would that work for you?
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Thanks Lane. Yes, that would work very well for us, provided that the URL is also equally obscure, otherwise anyone could easily find it by entering http://getsatisfaction.com/people/COM....
How would we go about keeping our company out of the public search? Would we have to request your admin to do this specifically for us, or is there something we can change in our settings?
Thanks again! -
Inappropriate?That would certanly work for me and my company. :) -
Inappropriate?if that's appealing to you, get in touch with our community manager Eric at eric -at- getsatisfaction.com.
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Inappropriate?Hi guys. As we've mentioned, while we don't have a private version, we can keep your company private -- as Lane says, it's security through obscurity. So it's not password protected or anything like that.
Just email info[at]getsatisfaction[dot]com and Eric or I will help you out with it. Basically, every company that gets added to GS is "private" until we manually make it "public". This is to prevent spam sites, inappropriate content, etc from getting into our search results and activity stream. So if you let us know that you want your area to remain "private" for now we'll just make a note to leave it as such.
This works well for companies who are in a private beta and want to have "private" conversations with their community members but not announce anything to the public at large. However, the assumption here is also that at some point you will have a public launch and at that point make your Get Satisfaction community public as well. I'm not sure I'd recommend this "hack" for a permanent private community solution.
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Inappropriate?Yes, give me a shout and I'll set you up the best way I can.
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Inappropriate?Thank you Lane, Amy and Eric! I really appreciate your quick responses and suggestions which also just goes to show how effective Get Satisfaction is! :)
Eric, I will send you an email now.
I’m thankful
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You're welcome! :)
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Inappropriate?I was caught by the subject of this dicussion, hoping GS remains an open, public forum. That serves the market; and companies benefit when they're accountable, even if they don't like their dirty laundry hung in public.
A forum where businesses can (welcomely) participate in customer dicussions is profoundly weighted in favor of the business. Customers will say what they will, here or elsewhere. Containment of customer complaints is futile, and I believe, counterproductive.
Customer complaints are easily reduced in a public forum. People tend to be less apt to insult companies or individuals "to their face." Plus, companies have the power of flattery; customers feel special when they "know someone who works there." They tend to not say bad things, or at least be civil, for fear you might not "like them."
If sensitive or secret information gets out, that's a company's internal problem; tie the gags tighter or keep the knowledgeable to a more select group. If containmment is lost, it's lost, with or without GS.
I'm a business guy, with customers, no doubt, at all levels of satisfacion. And I still vote: public, open, nowhere to hide. But no doubt some companies will pay, perhaps well. And GS deserves whatever revenue streams flow their way. Fingers crossed the long term dollars are best served with transparency.3 Comments Add a comment
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Good, stuff, Texas-Jim. Love your attitude.
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And what if the customer doesn't want their information disclosed? It is not always about you. :)
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No one is making a private conversation or information public without informed consent. Presumably, if folks communicate via GS they know and want to be a part of a social network. Plus, it's always about me :^)
Cheers, Jim -
Inappropriate?I would be interested in using GS as an internal communication tool for sharing ideas within a company.
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Inappropriate?I am absolutely in favor of an open conversation with our customers about our products and services but as others have said, that conversation should stay within the scope of us and our customers. I thought the premium or white label plans with integrated single sign-on and branding would offer that but I guess I am wrong.
I’m disappointed
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We're listening carefully, and are considering the best way to support this need. What you're saying makes sense and, yes, single sign-on would work to enable this well.
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Hmmmm? In my opinion, there's no trick to having conversations with customers. GS seems to be something more: a place where potential customers or even casual onlookers can see the extent to which a company addresses customer needs, etc. If you're any good, I'd think you'd want that made as public as possible ... heck, even if you're not that great, the buzz is a plus. What's the adage? I don't care what's said as long as they spell my name right?
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Inappropriate?@Texas-Jim: Depends on your business. I would agree if I would sell a consumer product without much competition. We are in the B2B world with a lot of competition.
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Inappropriate?Texas-Jim & Harald,
You both raise very good points.
I completely agree with Texas-Jim that responding publicly gives you the opportunity to show potential customers what you're all about. It's a chance to show the value of being your customer beyond just using your products and services. This is part of the value proposition that GS was built on.
However, Harald does raise a good point that this kind of exposure is not as relevant for B2B companies and that there are circumstances that would require some level of private communication.
I’m contemplative.
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Inappropriate?Agreed, private communication has its place in all businesses, B2B and otherwise. But a business controls what it says publicly; staying mum or communicating offline any information you do not want made public requires nothing more than constraint.
What's out of our control is what users say publicly. Any who choose to do so in a public forum will do so with or without our consent. I'm scratching my head as to why being able to moderate, and provide a vehicle with moderation, wouldn't be perferred to all other options a user has to vent, query or whatever. -
Inappropriate?I note this is about 6 months old, has it been implemented?
We have lots of users who want to post their source code to us for us to review with their problem, but they always want that to remain private.
Having some way to do both public and private would give us a single solution instead of having to implement two systems and the confusion of "post THAT over there instead".
I’m hopeful
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Inappropriate?Hi Jason,
No, this hasn't been implemented yet.
We're in the planning stages around two different things:
One is custom / private data fields that would be used at the time a topic is created.
The second -- but the thinking is not as far along on this one -- is private messaging that would run parallel to the public conversations.
Which of these two use cases are you most interested in?
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Inappropriate?it would also be a great way to manage an on-going private community of users to test new features for your products --- with no intention of ever making the conversations public to protect IP in case you decide against a launch.3 Comments Add a comment
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Yes, we're all over that use case. No need to persuade us on that front.
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cool, any idea when it will be available? or is it already and i just missed it?
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No, not available yet. Not sure when it will be but it *is* on our radar. :)
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Inappropriate?I am currently evaluating tools for collecting and managing customer and employee feedback for the B2B web application company I work for, and I would love to recommend we purchase GS, but cannot due to the lack of access control. We require a private forum for the following reasons:
- We are not willing to broadcast our community's ideas and our company's development plan to our competitors.
- We need one solution that will allow us to capture internal notes with community posts that are not visible to users who are not employees.
- We need to collect feedback from a small user group for beta features.
I understand GS's commitment to openness and transparency, but don't see how acknowledging that their are legitimate business needs for controlling access to conversations between a company and their customers would undermine this commitment. As people become more comfortable with having some of these conversations more publically, the need for access control will likely decrease, but it won't disappear altogether. And in the meantime, GS is losing customers that would love to start paying them. Since this thread is over a year old and nothing has been implemented to address this need, I have to assume that it is not a priority for GS and I will have to recommend a different solution. That's very disappointing.
I've been a fan of Adaptive Path and its alumni since I attended the launch party in SF shortly after working on a project with Indi Young, so was immediately interested in GS when I saw Lane was involved. I also very much enjoyed Thor's presentation at WebVisions a few weeks ago. I'm sure that GS is going to continue to improve, and I wish you luck with it. From my perspective, though, a little less ideology and a little more support for B2B business requirements would lead us all to a lot more happy customers (and business analysts/ux designers)!
I’m disappointed
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Hi Grey,
Thanks for the kind words. We take your input very seriously and are not religious about not allowing private areas within communities, we just have had to stick to our strategic priorities, and public interaction has been our #1 focus. We absolutely believe that private discussion has an important place within our system, and we look forward to including it. I'm sorry we don't have it for you at this time! -
Thanks for the reply, Thor. Private areas within public forums are great, but what many of us here are asking for is both public and private areas within private company forums. It sounds like your comment from a year ago is still true: "We aren't inclined to make whole companies "private." Just to be sure I understand, is this because GS is committed to remaining focused on B2C-consumer customer support interactions and isn't interested in or doesn't have the bandwidth to provide a private version of the same software for B2B-business customer product development interactions? Or are you saying that GS believes that B2B-business customer product development interactions should not need to be kept private between a company and their users/customers? Selfishly, I wish you offered a similar product focused on product development customer feedback mgmt because the additional touches in this post/reply/comment space really set GS apart. Throw in ranking/rating of posts, integrated survey functionality, and some custom configuration options for categories, post form fields, and status values, and GS would be the clear leader in this space. I guess I'll just have to hope that IdeaScale copies a page from your book with respect to your post/reply/comment UI and your change log and notifications. There's a lot to love about this interaction design. Well done!
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In general we believe that there is always a public aspect to the community--even for B2B companies--and that the real question is where the line exists between that public zone and the private one. Part of the reason we believe this is where we think the market is going, and part of it is the nature of our product--it's ultimately a network of customer communities, and so public spaces that can support the connection points between companies and products is very important to us. We don't believe that silos leverage benefits of the network, and this will be a guiding principle with whatever support we provide for private conversations/areas.
Thanks again! -
Inappropriate?I understand that you have implemented a way to keep a company's Get Sat forum private. I was wondering if there was a way to keep your company profile public, but to have a company product forum remain private instead? For instance your company introduces a new a product, but would only like users registered for that product to have access to that particular forum.
This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled
Private Product Forum for Users?.
I’m wondering ...
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Inappropriate?Is it possible to add a company/product but not public? I want to add a company/product just for the employees. We have a product and we want just the employees to give us some feedback about this.
This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled
Is it possible to add a private product?.
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Inappropriate?We are a software company looking at providing a private community platform for our customers. Do you have a version of your platform that supports a private community?
This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled
Private Community.
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Inappropriate?I can't express to the team at Get Satisfaction enough how much we desperately need the ability to turn topics into private conversations, for the following reasons:
1) to debug a customer's issue, we often need for them to post screenshots or provide other information that is personal/sensitive/confidential. Today, we tell them to email us.
2) we need a way for team members to communicate privately amongst ourselves within a topic.
In both cases we move the discussion out of Get Satisfaction and into email, instead of having everything in one place.
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Inappropriate?Sadly, Get Satisfaction has no motivation to do this......oh they'll be nice about it, but we aren't going to see it happen...
prove me wrong? -
Inappropriate?well, it's certainly not true that we have no motivation. as you can see from this topic, there are a number of different ideas about what it means to be "private," from an entirely private, firewalled community to individually private conversations and replies.
we definitely recognize the need for some of this, and we're just trying to figure out which pieces of it fit our model and how to get them into our development schedule along with everything else. but i don't know that taunting us is going to speed things up much. :)
I’m figuring it out
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Agreed. Keep the discussion positive, succinctly articulate your requirements, and either wait for Get Satisfaction to implement them, or adopt an alternative solution that works better. The nice thing about a free market is that people can vote with their feet (and their wallets).
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Inappropriate?The thing is we have some hesitancy to use GS because of the openness of it. We have a highly unionized environment and if people post comments or complaints about specific people it could launch a grievance. Does GS have any unionized companies that are members and what's their experience?
I’m undecided
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Inappropriate?If I may Intrude on your conversation here :)
I think the effort toward maintaining transparency on this site should be applauded.It does a very effective job at leveling what is usually an extremely uneven playing field. It makes everyone accountable for their words which is a rarity.I think the transparency also cuts out a lot of smoke and mirrors that tend to get in the way of problem solving and conflict resolution.I understand the need for privacy in the situations outlined in this thread and I wonder if maybe this isnt the place for those specific conversations.I would hate to see Get Satisfaction change in an effort to be more broad use .I can't see that as an improvement . Maybe internal mail would be helpful...ok I'm done:) you can start throwing things at me now. -
Inappropriate?actually a great point. there are other tools out there that cater to the 'private' feedback loop (like communispace).
I, for one, was hoping getsatisfaction would consider creating a competitive tool so there would be a more reasonably priced option out there. Plus they do such a great job with UI. :)
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Inappropriate?I would like to be able to create an internal forum for staff members to log their thoughts away from the users. This is my thoughts on a private forum.
Is anything like this implemented yet?
Thanks
Tom
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Inappropriate?I did not read this entire thread, so forgive me if I'm just an echo. But one thing that makes my job very hard is that there's no hidden pass-through information from the feedback widgit that links the customers from my site to their GS profiles. Every time a customer has a complaint, in order to research their problem or the potential bug in my system I have to go through this really awkward public "give me your email or something that identifies you but don't make it too obvious if you're not cool with it" kind of rigmarole.
We (IZEA) currently have the Basic Community Plan. I would like to know if it would be possible for us to just pass through an ID from the widgit that would only show to logged in IZEA employees when looking at a customer's profile in Get Satisfaction. That way I can easily identify their account information and get straight to troubleshooting without the awkward public "so, tell me who you are now..." stuff.
Also, it would be super cool if we could pass through their email address and have them logged in automatically. It's kind of klunky and awkward for them to log into our site, and then click on feedback and then have to login again - often with the same email address.
Thanks!
Priscilla
P.S. I got a lot of ideas from one of our users complaints on this thread: http://getsatisfaction.com/izea/topic...2 Comments Add a comment
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Hi, Priscilla. We offer FastPass, which means your customers don't have to log in, and we offer Zendesk integration, which lets you have private conversations with your customers if you use Zendesk. We might also have other ways that i am simply not recalling. I can connect you with someone here if you want to learn more about how these work.
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Inappropriate?I've setup a support website of my own. I dont think sugarsync has enough of the features that I'm looking for.
Anyone looking to do this please get in touch.
tom[at] can did sky [dot] com
I’m happy now
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Inappropriate?We are trying to roll out GS across our organisation as the primary support application but as our consumers are 'internal' every department heads asks if they can prevent 'external' people replying. Currently we can't so none of them have implemented it.
Just echoing everyone else I guess but some move towards controlling access would pay huge dividends, even if it was just read only for some. Haven't read all the posts but could there be way to restrict access by IP address range?
I’m hoping but not hopeful
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There is a forum board called PHPBB that can do this kind of ip blocking. Look it up. I'm developing my support board as we speak. Early doors yet. can did sky [dot] com [forward slash] support.
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Inappropriate?It's probably my total lack of business training / experience , but , I am not grasping the problem with 'external' people replying. If someone could give me an example I would appreciate it.
I hope that if Get Satisfaction is leaning towards implementing private functions that they would do it on a separate site. I think that the
" openness " of this site kind of forces an integrity that isn't standard in consumer relations .I would really hate if that changed.
I’m open to the possability that i am wrong
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Imagine you run a customer service division within a company -- HR, IT, etc. People can post issues and problems behind a corporate firewall -- it's completely open within the company -- but this kind of information shouldn't be available to the public.
The reason so many of us are frustrated here is that this isn't a matter of either/or. The basic technology is the same -- the principles are the same. It is just changing who the users/customers are.
It's really a matter of focus/a business model for Get Satisfaction. I'm sure they have limited time/resources -- and adding a layer of having to work within a company's IT infrastructure creates complexity. That's the core issue. And I get it. They have to know the size and shape of the value in going down that route. I, for one, would be very interested in paying to use Get Satisfaction behind my corporate firewall (or something similar) and would be happy to scope out needs case and budget around that. -
In our particular case we have taught programmes in which we want to make GS the primary 'support' forum. As these are somewhat specialised, it is really only the students on the programme and the administration staff that would be able to answer with any authority. Due to this we would not like 'external' people posting responses that would in all likelihood be incorrect or misleading. Also there is some commercial sensitivity in that other competing institutions would potentially be able to see details that would otherwise not be available.
I think for any company that has very public and widely used 'products' (maybe there is a problem with that terminology) then having a completely open support forum is appropriate. However for companies that have more specialised or commercially sensitive 'products' it's not. -
Inappropriate?Thank you fore taking the time to answer that for me I appreciate it. Is what your saying is you wouldn't want your shareholders or media to know about internal conflicts or specific customer issues ?
I’m learning
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Inappropriate?Some of the free forums out there are incredibly powerful. with multi administration access and hundreds of add ons... Also the themes make them look really swish.
If you're looking for a private access forum, try the new phpbb. (this is not an advert, I just got it and liked it)
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Inappropriate?My argument for private sections or access management would be the following:
In most companies there are may be two dialogs: The external one (e.g.: the company with the public - this is the dialog that Get Satisfaction handles) and the internal dialog *within* the company (e.g.: between employees).
We have found Get Satisfaction an extremely useful tool in providing support to our customers - it would be great to be able to offer the same type of support and discussion internally using the same tool (that we have tried and tested and are happy with).
Obviously such internal conversations (perhaps about technical issues, or new features etc) cannot be public on the internet - however; providing the kind of openness and accountability that a system like get satisfaction provides *within* our company would be a big win.
Furthermore, if we were able to facilitate our internal employee dialog in the same place that we communicate with our external users, this would go a long way in aligning internal decisions with external feedback as well as improving employee activity in the public forum.
I know there are plenty of tools out there that we *could* use, however, Get Satisfaction is a tool that *is* working for us, and *could* work for us internally without us needing to add *Yet Another Tool* to our already dauntingly large list of tools ...
Finally: surely it wouldn't be *that* hard to simply allow a private area with access limited to users of certain roles (e.g.: Employee or maybe Champ). You already have implemented Roles as it is :^)
I’m really keen to see this feature
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I like this idea a lot. Very important, I think.
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I agree with Christo :) In addition we have a team of Yola Experts who build sites for clients who need a private forum. We would prefer them to use Get Satisfaction, but right now this is not possible for them. I fully appreciate that the basis of Get Satisfaction is open conversation, but I can see very specific use cases for a private forum that do not conflict with this. As long as the conversation between customers and companies remained open, I can see a lot of value in an added private "company space".
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Inappropriate?A member only area is important for us as well. We work with many professional/trade associations - and access/participation in a knowledge community like this is a huge member benefit. We don't want to make it available to everyone, as we want it to be a reason new members sign up to join the trade association.
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Inappropriate?Have to agree that having a private or white label version of GS would be immense - The idea of folding GS into an an internal offering to help a company communicate better with its employees, would be a hit - right now I'm trying to find ways of providing better engagement mechanisms within the HR sector, and could see GS working really well. -
Inappropriate?This is why you use Zendesk and Zendesk Forums. It's a little more classic than GS, but gets the job done.
GS is very adamant about being public, and I think it'll limit their growth. We like them, but you have to buy into the everything-online-transparency mantra.
We also do not like how users are essentially joining a group of collective GS forums -- doesn't seem that useful to us, but it does seem useful to GS. I think the Power-To-The-Users mantra is a cover. In the end they need to see that the business needs to succeed and they'll just lose the higher end business.
Great Web2.0-ish tool though our users think it's a bit too much going on. We still like it enough to use it.
I’m indifferent
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Hey, great points! I don't know about the "cover" business, though. We really believe in transparency. I do hear you about the need for privacy in some ways, and I think we'll get there. It's always evolving, and I think we'll find a way to reconcile this -- and also build up a "network" of communities that can help consumers who are here to get help from more than one company. Appreciate your comments.
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Inappropriate?Hi Cory,
We actually are considering some kind of solution to meet the needs of customers who want private communities. I'm not sure what that would look like exactly, but I believe we'll be tackling it some time in 2010.
You do make some good points, however, I can't help but take issue with the accusation that, as you say "the Power-To-The-Users mantra is a cover". :)
When we were first conceiving of Get Satisfaction, we envisioned it as a sort of one-stop shop for customer support so that customers could take control of their relationships with the companies they patronize. We also saw the need for companies to have a place to provide support in a manner that was both one-to-many and customer-to-customer. Read this for a little more background on what inspired the idea of Get Satisfaction.
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Inappropriate?I agree that forcing all conversations to be 100% public will limit the growth of GS. This is such a fantastic system, but the fact remains that some conversations should only be open within the company, or within a specific sector of the company's client base.
I actually work for a charity serving children, and would love to one day use a tool like this to allow our children to participate in conversations about the services we provide. However, it would be *very* important - for obvious reasons - that those conversations only be open *within* the community of children... we couldn't possibly risk allowing the general public to read the children's posts.
Perhaps it would be best to use another tool - clearly there are a lot of them - but, as many users have pointed out, we love GS!
So... basically I love the idea of being able to create a "private area" for a specific group of users.
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Thanks for the feedback, Jake!
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Inappropriate?Agreed, private communication has its place in all businesses, B2B and otherwise. But a business controls what it says publicly; staying mum or communicating offline any information you do not want made public requires nothing more than constraint.
What's out of our control is what users say publicly. Any who choose to do so in a public forum will do so with or without our consent. I'm scratching my head as to why being able to moderate, dizi izle and provide a vehicle with moderation, wouldn't be perferred to all other options a user has to vent, query or whatever.
I’m kidding
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Inappropriate?As a software editor, it is great to have users comments and suggestions. It is not a problem to have it in a public place. However, when working on private beta, it would be great to have a private place limited to the selected beta testers. I hope you'll offer us a solution soon :)
I’m confident
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We are working on a large project and will be heading into private BETA with our client base early next year. Get Satisfaction has everything that we were looking for in a community environment - really great look and feel. I understand your philosophy and ideas, it just doesn't quite fit our needs at this time. I will take a look again in 2010. Thanks
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Inappropriate?While it's great to have a channel for people to provide BETA feedback, using Get Satisfaction for a BETA program can be very problematic:
* People will usually search by company, not by product. So even if you have two separate products, Product X Beta and Product X 1.0, the search results will be mixed. So when a potential customer seeks help, they'll find all sorts of issues related to the BETA, such as "Product X is crashing every time".
This could impact customer confidence and sales.
* Search results are not returned with the product name next to them, so there's no indicator that an issue was logged against a BETA product.
* There's no way to archive a product, even if its only a BETA. While keeping everything active may sound good on paper for the sake of "openness and transparency", in practice it adds noise to search results, making the the right answer even more difficult to find.
* Get Satisfaction will not remove a product if it has too many topics associated with it (I think more than 5).
* There's no way to bulk archive individual topics, they must be archived one at a time.
* There's no way to see which records have been archived while in management view, which makes archiving individual topics very difficult.
* There's no way to bulk move topics to another community.
Question for Get Satisfaction... is there a way to move a BETA product out of the company, or exclude a product from search results?
What happens when a product is no longer viable, e.g. the beta is over or the product long discontinued?
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You make some great points, Sherman. Archiving does remove topics from search, which we encourage for anything that adds noise to the community, but we know that a critical tool for cases like this is bulk moderation. We will be rolling out a way to do bulk moderation (including archiving, and moving to another community) of topics in Q1. We're also working on changing the business rules around things like removing products to give companies a lot more management of what appears and when.
Until then, we can do some of these bulk archiving and moving tasks by request, though they need to get scheduled. Email me at thor at getsatisfaction.com and I'll do my best to get in the dev queue.
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