Recently created discussions in Get Satisfaction

Get Satisfaction feels good. I can't say yet if it will work for my 'little idea' but it feels good. That's all. Well done and thank you!

Hi GSFN Team,

I recently overheard someone mention that you use Trac for your bug tracking. It got me thinking about the customer service "cycle" when someone reports a bug (or feature).

In an ideal world, someone would:

1. report a bug via gsfn


2. it gets "fixed" via whatever internal process or tools that a company uses


3. the customer is notified (via gsfn) that the problem was resolved

A similar process would be used for feature requests.

I think I really dig this flow from a customer's perspective. They're shielded from the internal stuff that a company goes through to fix a bug, and other customers can participate or be notified of the resolution as well.

It sounds like the Satisfaction team uses a similar process. I guess my question is, how do you manage it? I know bugs sometimes take a long time to resolve... How do you follow up with the original topic? Do you have a custom field in Trac that you copy/paste the topic URL into when you create a ticket? Some other magic sauce?

Our company is moving to Get Satisfaction for our online customer support, and I want to make sure we don't forget about any topics when we implement new features or fix bugs. Does anyone else out there have a way to "complete the cycle" that works well for them? I'd love to hear some discussion about this.

Thanks!
-John

The Get Satisfaction user interface is too convoluted, shouldn't be so. While I and others could give you online feedback, of course, it would be much better if you guys were to directly observe people using Get Satisfaction for the first time.

The process, pages and dialogs that customers have to fill out to report a problem are to complex and confusing.

Our company has a vibrant and growing community using Get Satisfaction and we are very excited about it! The new features that have added a whole new dimension to the quality of our support are the "Overheard" button - which has allowed us to make quality connection with our customers via Twitter. People have been startled and delighted that we listen to what they say about our service on the internet, and take the time to respond and help. The Get Satisfaction "Overheard" feature makes it so easy to make these contacts. The other feature we just love is the ability to upload screenshots. It makes it so much easier to explain our technology when we can show a picture!

You can now upload images and attach them to your topics and replies.

Just look for the button



After spending time developing a rich text WYSIWYG editor we came to the conclusion that DesignMode was not what we needed.

We already support a broad range of HTML tags. What we really needed was the ability to attach images. So we pulled out that functionality and integrated it into the current "plain text" editor. You'll notice that when you insert or upload an image it injects an html escaped image tag rather than displaying the image.

This approach has its ups and downs, but I'm pretty confident that it's the right one for us. I'd love to get everyone's opinion on this (if you have one)

Thanks, and happy uploading!

Not so much a question but the new interface is a big improvement, focus lies on the questions/topics/ideas/problems. Much better for companies with only 1 product - less space wasted there. Also the distinction between the types of questions is much better.

Well done Leslie!

Let's talk Metasoft...

I just got this account and i don't know how, i didn't sign up for it but i got it. and i have like 70 followers i don't know them or where they came from. can somebody tell me what's going on here. like who are these people fallowing me? and how did i get this account? and what is this account all about? I might want to keep it

Hi Get Satisfaction team,

some more things that came to my mind, while I was surfing here the last minutes:

1.) It should be easier to reach your company "space" (?), you should have the right (and the reason) to place your space on your own site prominently, as you are the provider of this service! E.g. it could be possible to reach your "space" through the click on your logo, which' function doubles with the already existing (and sufficient) "Home" link! A second possibility could be to link it on the right side at the "top" of all the "not-so-important" stuff on the home page. ("not-so-important" concerns the text and is just my opinion. ;-))

2.) Now the title idea: I surf the web and I read feeds and especially the latter constantly reminds me of some companies, I didn't check if they're here. But the problem is, once I searched a company and found it and want to search another one, I have to make at least one click to reach a search page. So maybe a "Do you like to search for another company / product" AJAX-pop up would be fitting, after one has added a product / company to his dashboard.

3.) I'm kind of wondering about certain companies. I have criticised the widespread of half-finished, not fitting or bogus products but in our discussion, we all thought it is correct, that companies would "clean the mess", if they're in control. But as I'm looking into several companies, it doesn't seem to be like that. I just don't know, why there are company "spaces" here, where there are "7 employees are listening and participating", but two of the three products aren't of the company, other is a plugin for another software and one is a completely different product! It seems some user did that, as some people are too stupid to even get this veeery simple and straightforward interface (praise! :)) that you offer them here! -.-
Maybe I'm a little bit too perfectionist, I don't know?! (because of that, I packed all this into a discussion. ;-)) But if it were up to me, I'd even make the addition of a picture to a new company and product a must. ;)

4.) Additional "Sort-by" options: If not there is at least a "personal usage" "sort-by:" function (I know you are looking into that :)), it maybe (also) should be possible to "prioritize" companies and products. Or maybe just drag & drop them around. Although I think, if there will be a "Sort by: personal usage frequency" this almost my above ideas.
But maybe the above ideas are more appealing to you than my last one concerning this. ;-)

5.) I'd still find it very useful (although GS is easy to use and understand) to make a manual and/or FAQ (maybe as a wiki) explaining all the way this works here with Get Satisfaction.
Because I'm constantly asking myself: "Am I missing something? Am I maybe just too dump to find / recognize / get it?" ;) As at the moment, where I'm asking myself, if I'm still missing the manual / FAQ, which you of course do have ever since. ;-)

Hi there,

when first using GetSatisfaction, I thought the tags that are recommended to me, will get more. But they don't. Is this because there is not enough "tagging folk" or are the other tags missing the certain "critical mass"? Maybe you should lower it then...

The point is, I used the tag "usability" several times, but it didn't show up. Also I think, the mood tags are a little limited. The best solution would be from my point of view (if this is technically possible) to immediately recommend the tags, that one (the user) has used before.

Howdy, folks!

I thought I'd share the cognitive dissonance I find I'm experiencing pretty consistently when it comes to replying...

* First, I'm never sure whether I should be replying to a topic, replying to a reply, commenting on a reply, commenting on a comment. I find the bifurcation truly mind-boggling, I'm afraid.

* Because of the outdentation (it's a word — it is now, at least ;-) of the "Add a comment", I'm never sure (when I finally do decide on whether to reply or comment), what I'm commenting on: the reply or another comment.

* Because the "Add a comment" link appears above the comment-thread, I keep having to look for it when reading a string of comments and not finding it at the bottom.

* The overall ordering and indentation really chops up the conversation such that I have to do a lot more mental assemblage to discern who is replying to or commenting on whose reply or comment.

* I often start with a comment and realize I am going to need a little more room (and that this really should be a reply — perhaps??) and then have to copy and paste my comment thus far into a reply textarea and go from there. When the opposite occurs and I end up just saying "Cool!", I never bother downgrading this reply to comment status (even though I should??).

I can't help but feeling that this would best be cleared up by:

* Threading the topic (bonus points for show/hide thread/responses link).

* Adding a "Reply [to this reply]" ([] bits optional) directly (not in- or out-dented) under each reply.

* Adding an "Add to this topic" for those times when you have something to add that's not a reply to any one reply in particular.

* Doing away with comments altogether. If there's a need for responding directly to a reply, you should be able to reply to it in a threaded manner. If the aim is to allow for quick responses to posts, rather than split things based on length of response (and size of textarea), why not icons like: thumbs up/down, smiley/frowney, star, etc...?

I appreciate all you're making available to us — and am more than thrilled that I don't have to build it myself in addition to my products — but I think before much more is added, there needs to be some taking away. (And of course I'm not talking about a redesign effort: some subtle folding and merging would do the trick.)

Thanks again for always listening to and accommodating the sheer volume of us you do.

—Rael

As Lane saw this morning http://twitter.com/monstro/statuses/8... most people who use Typepad, Movable Type, or VOX don't know they are "products" of the company "Six Apart" rather they think each product is a "company".

Searching for the company "Typepad", "Movable Type", or "Vox" doesn't provide results

What is the best practice for capturing these requests for help?

Can we map companies to products of a company?

Or should we create separate companies for each product?

Problem: 6 topics per page
Solution: More cowb^H^H^H^topics!

We didn't listen well enough in the past on this issue, Jeff Mancuso from MagnetK brought it up again today. For such a simple solution, this should have been fixed long ago.

Thanks for the heads up Jeff!

A quick criticism I'd like to levy against your otherwise great service.

It's extremely click-heavy, and sort of a huge pain to navigate.

1. You need to click into every post - then you need to manually scroll all the way to the bottom.

2. Pagination - I need to click into a new page to get the next 6 posts? I don't see a great reason for making it so few. 15-20 seems like it wouldn't come at much cost.

3. Use of back button. Satisfaction is one of the few modern web-apps that relies so heavily on the "back" button to get around. If I'm on page 5 [again, grr] of recent posts - have clicked in to some topic, then manually scrolled to the bottom, the only way I can get back to where I was before is by hitting the back button. There isn't a next or previous topic [requested elsewhere] to help me keep moving along

I know you guys are really trying hard to approach customer service from the perspective of what is best for the customers, and I totally respect that. But most of the time on the site is going to be spent by those answering requests, not those occasionally needing help. For us, things really aren't optimal right now.

Wow.. within 2h or something my profile is in the top 5 of Google.

http://www.google.be/search?hl=en&cli...

But I was thinking; is there any way you can implement the option to put a no-index meta on your profile? (as an option in the settings)

It's really quite easy to change the look-and-feel of your Help Center, though it may not be immediately obvious how to navigate the files. I'll try to make it simple to wrap your head around what's going on.

I'm going to assume you've downloaded and installed your Help Center, and it's running with all the "factory settings." I'll refer to the root directory as helpcenter. The standard issue theme is located in helpcenter/themes/default. It holds all the css and templates that are used. (Note that while there is an images directory in that path for theme-specific images, all basic images are contained in helpcenter/images)

You can customize the visual styling of your Help Center to an incredible degree with CSS alone. The base stylesheet is style.css, which styles the bread and butter components that you probably don't want to change, at least not to start. This stylesheet also links to "sprinkles_default.css" which contains styles for the elements that you're likely to want to change from a branding standpoint (colors, typography, header, sidebar, footer, forms). To quickly get a feel for what this stylesheet controls you can flip these two lines:

/*@import url('sprinkles_envy.css');*/
@import url('sprinkles_default.css');

Just uncomment the first line and comment out the second one. Now reload your Help Center to see the effects. Nifty, eh? Okay, now change it back so the following descriptions make sense.

If you're familiar with CSS you should recognize the landscape when you open up sprinkles_default.css. This isn't a CSS tutorial so I won't describe exactly how to achieve various effects, but it is reasonably well commented for finding your way around. However, the code at the top of the stylesheet bears some explanation.

In order to make it easy to change the layout and number of columns we borrowed code from Andy Skelton and Scott Allan Wallick's Sandbox Wordpress Theme. With their system all you need to do is uncomment the line that corresponds to the layout you want. So in the default setting we're using 2 columns with the sidebar on the right, shown below:

/* Two-column with sidebar on right */
@import url('templates/sandbox-layouts/2c-r.css');
/* Two-column with sidebar on left */
/*@import url('templates/sandbox-layouts/2c-l.css');*/
/* Three-column with sidebars on left */
/*@import url('templates/sandbox-layouts/3c-l.css');*/
/* Three-column with sidebars on right */
/*@import url('templates/sandbox-layouts/3c-r.css');*/
/* Three-column with content in the center */
/*@import url('templates/sandbox-layouts/3c-b.css');*/
/* One-column with content in the center */
/*@import url('templates/sandbox-layouts/1c-b.css');*/

To change this to three columns with two sidebars on the left you'd comment out the current line and uncomment this one:

@import url('templates/sandbox-layouts/3c-l.css');

This system works because the sidebar template (sidebar.t) breaks the sidebar content into two parts defined by ids called "primary" and "secondary". You could hack that template to further customize the layout.

You should be able to get dramatic effects with just editing this one CSS file.

-----
If you want to really edit the contents or structure of the pages you can create a whole new theme. You can start by copying the default theme, naming it something meaningful to you. You'd end up with something like this: helpcenter/themes/custom. In order to use this new theme rather than default, open up helpcenter/Sprinkles.php with a text editor and edit the path on this line:

$smarty->template_dir = $sprinkles_dir . '/themes/default/templates/';

In the case above we'd just change the word "default" to "custom".

The templates themselves use a PHP templating system called Smarty [http://smarty.net]. This allows us to keep the arcane php code out of the html, replacing it with the simpler Smarty code that is used inside curly brackets like this: {smarty_code}. There are templates for both pages and page objects like header, footer and sidebar. When a page object needs to be displayed inside a page template it is called with a bit of code that looks like this:

{include file="template_name.t"}

The template names match the url for the page you're on. So if you want to edit the contents or layout of http://help.YOURDOMAIN.com/helpstart.php you would edit themes/custom/helpstart.t and any page objects that are linked inside it.

For those who may not be aware this is possible or get that it's possible but haven't figured out how to do it, read on...

Disclaimer: We are working on refining this process. We are aware that it is currently awkward and overly complicated and not at all intuitive.

That said, this is how to currently do it:

Let's say you want to associate Company A's product (we'll call it Foo) with Company B.

1. Go to Company A's Product & Services page (you'll find the tab on their Get Satisfaction home page)

2. Click on the product or service you want to associate ("Foo") which opens up that product page

3. Click the "Edit this product" link over on the right

4. That launches a modul window that allows you to edit the details of the product or service. Under "Related Companies" click the "Add another relationship" button

5. Start typing the company name "Company B" and you will be given a list of results. Select the correct result and then select a relationship type. Then click the Save Product button.

6. Now you should see "Foo" over on Company B's Products & Services page under the "Related To" tab. AND it will show up as a product or service option when creating a new topic fo Company B.

(screenshots coming...)

Great Idea! I Love it! Your site is fantastic. And that little happy/sad face thing is a wonderful, at-a-glance, indicator! Thanks again!

Your site allows users like myself to ADD A COMPANY. Anyone Can Do It? is your motto on that service. Being a techno-geek and a natural born promoter, I want to include here my favorite sites especially those that really will make the WEB 2.0 cut with a great product and service.

So I submitted respectfully and with good product coverage, a favorite site and am thinking that it is attributed to my user profile now. Is that correct?

I am contacting the site with the link to it's representation. What is going to occur when the site wants to take ownership of this product profile? What if they refuse to be represented? What have I done and is there any sense to it, hahah?

Looking forward to this response, big time.

wesley
aka
djchoppercat