Recently active topics in Get Satisfaction tagged with admin tips

The Put Satisfaction on Your Site page of the Admin section is where admins can find our nifty widgets. Currently, we have two widgets:

1. Topic Search Widget: Allows your users to search and get results for Satisfaction topics on your own website. They'll also be able to submit new topics! Once they click on a listed topic suggestion or hit the "Add details and submit" button they'll be taken to the corresponding page in your Satisfaction site.

2. Live Topic Widget: Put a list of Get Satisfaction topics from your Satisfaction site on your own website. Choose what kind of topics, how many, and more. It's like a dynamic FAQ. Once a user clicks on one of the topics they'll be taken to that topic page on your Satisfaction site.

To add either of these widgets click the "Get it!" button. Then you'll be able to customize the perameters for the type of results you want displayed and see a handy in-line preview by clicking the "Preview" button. Once you've set the options the way you want them, copy out the Markup code and CSS code by clicking the corresponding "copy" buttons and pasting in the appropriate places in your site. You can customize the visual look of the widget to match your site by changing the CSS or changing the markup to call your own CSS code.

We also have a couple of badges you can use as links from your web site to your Satisfaction site.

Hey Official Reps and Company Admins: We’ve created an area in the right-hand side of your company’s page where you can spotlight messages to your customers. Ask for feedback, get help with your product development ideas, give them status updates — any kind of topic that you want to highlight or that you want your customers to weigh in on.

Right now, we’ve simply set this featured conversation to be the *most recent* topic an "Official Rep" from your company has created. In the future, you’ll have more control over what is displayed, but we’ve already found this to be incredibly useful here, in our own section of the Get Satisfaction site.

Here are some examples of how it's being used:

Along with our announcement about Overheard this morning, we're also releasing something potentially even bigger -- Help Center. Help Center is a set of PHP templates we've been working on the last six months that you can use to recreate an entire Help section for your site that runs on top of our API. Just download and install (like using Wordpress,) and your customers can ask questions, report problems, share ideas, and start discussions all in within the context of your own site. Since it's run on top of our API, the same content and the same conversations will work just fine whether people are talking on your site or talking on ours.

Here are a few companies already using Help Center: Skitch, Joby, makers of the Gorillapod, and MyBlogLog, a Yahoo! company. You can also see a default install of it running against our very own Get Satisfaction support area.

We've also thrown up a couple of example sites of our own, just to show you how extensible it is, using a few of our more active Get Satisfaction companies: Twitter, Timbuk2, and PBWiki.

We've worked hard to make using this as simple as possible (for example, we got all three of the above sites up and running in less than a day, even with the design changes.) But if you have any issues getting started or ideas for what to make better, this is the place for them, so let us know.

The Products & Services page of the Admin section is where an admin can add a primary product or service to their Satisfaction site. This is best applied to companies who have one product or service or a primary product or service that they'd want most topics assoicated with. Once set, this product or service will be automatically attached to all topic posts unless removed on a per topic basis.

To set a primary product or service that has already been added to your Satisfaction site simply select it from the drop down list provided.

To set a primary product or service that has not been added to your Satisfaction site, click the "Add a new product or service" link. Fill out the form that pops open:
Product name; Upload an image; Select "Product" or "Service"; Add a description; Add a link to your external product or service page by clicking the "Add a new link" button; click "Create Product" or "Create Service".

Now find that product or service in the drop down list and select it.




If your company has several products or services it may not make sense for you to set a primary one. In this case, you can add all your products and services by clicking on the "Add a new product or service" button in the left column of the main page of your Satisfaction site. A window will pop open where you can add the name, upload an image and add a description and an external link.

Ryan McCue posted a great step-by-step "cheat sheet" for installing Get Satisfaction's Help Center on your site. Check it out!

If anyone has posted tips & tricks for implementing and/or customzing/styling Help Center on their blogs, share your links as replies to this topic or -- better yet -- post your tips here on Get Satisfaction.

UPDATE:

The Accounts & Roles page of the Admin section is where Admins can add employees, invite employees, assign roles and edit roles.

There are three levels of roles:

1. Employee = An Employee title is attached to their avatar in your Satisfaction site so that users know that they have an internal perspective. They do not have access to other tools or the Admin section. They can not mark a reply as the "Best answer from the company" or set the status on their replies. Their interaction within your Satisfaction site is not necessarily considered the official voice.

2. Official Rep = An Employee title is attached to your avatar in your Satisfaction site and your topic posts and replies within your own site are accompanied by an Official Rep badge which indicates that you are an official voice of the company. You can set your reply and other employee replies as the "Best answer from the company" or set the status on your replies.

3. Admin = Same controls and advantages of an Official Representative. You also will have access to the Admin tools via the Admin link in the top bar.

Adding employees:

- If you have an official email domain, add it under "Add a company website" and click the "Add it" button. Any employees already registered in Satisfaction with their official email address will automatically show up in the list above as an Employee.

- To add individual users add their email address under "Upgrade one person to employee status" and click the "Upgrade" button. If they're already in the system with that email address they'll show up as an employee in the list above. If they're not, you'll be prompted to send them an invite to Satisfaction.

- Managing the roles: Once you have your list of employees under "Manage roles" you can change their role status or remove them. Removing their employee affiliation will not delete their user account.

UPDATE:
The Get Satisfaction system will dynamically create FAQs over time as users ask questions and they get answered by reps and other users. However, we know that many companies want to leverage their existing FAQs. Since Get Satisfaction works by harnessing real dialog, and traditional FAQs are usually formal documentation, it doesn't make sense to confuse your "real" voice with that of the documentation so instead, create a user that is clearly the "official voice".

• We recommend: Set up a user account, separate from your own with the nickname "[company name] FAQ" (See the Timbuk2 Get Satisfaction site for an example or see screenshot below)


• Add the question part of your FAQ as a Question from that FAQ user account


• Reply to the question either as the FAQ user if the response is your company's formal response or as yourself if you plan to give a response in your own words.


• Tag them with "faq" and "help"


• If you're an Official Rep or Admin for your site you can mark your replies as the "company answer".


The following screenshot shows how Timbuk2 has posted their FAQ questions with their FAQ user account, has answered them with a personal user account and where they can click to mark it as the best answer:



An example of appropriate tags for FAQs and what happens when you mark your FAQ answer as the company answer:




• If you have a large number of FAQs or knowledge base, talk to us about options for importing them into Satisfaction. (email info [at] getsatisfaction [dot] com)

The Company Details page of the Admin section is where an Admin can update the info about their company in Satisfaction. Admins can:

- Change the company display name; click "Save name and description" button

- Add or edit the description; click "Save name and description" button

- Add or change out the company logo; click the "Save logo" button

- Add external links; select a label, add the URL and click the "Save links" button

- Provide answers to customer questions when and where they need it

- Promote conversation around each FAQ to make it more personal and self-updating

- Allow for multiple answers from different customer perspectives

- Dynamically add new questions to your FAQ by using Satisfaction widgets

If you see a company or organization in Satisfaction that you own or work for and it doesn't have any employees associated with it yet you can claim it. How? you ask. We like employees to get involved so we give you several ways:

1. On a company's Satisfaction site to the right of the Start a Topic bar there will be some text that says "Is this your company?". Click the "Learn how to get involved" link. If there are already employees affilitiated it will say "X [company name] employees are here listening and participating" instead.



2. Once you add a company to Satisfaction you'll be given the option to claim it.



3. On the "Companies & Organizations" page you'll see a "Claim it!" link on the right above the list of recently added companies.



In all three cases you'll be taken to a page where you can learn more about Satisfaction and click the "Claim it!" link



or search for your company then click the "Claim it" link.



You'll be asked to fill out a form with some basic information.

Next we'll need to confirm your affiliation with the company. This can take up to about two business days. The more proof you can give us of your affiliation with the company the faster your claim will be approved. For instance, an email address with a domain that matches the company's official URL helps tremendously. Once we've verified your affiliation with your company we'll set your role within your company's Satisfaction site and you'll be good to go! You'll get an email at that point that helps to point you in the right direction for what to do next.

If you have any further questions about the claim process please post them here in our Satisfaction site or email me at amy [at] getsatisfaction [dot] com.

There are several great reasons to get involved now. Here are a few:

- Instantly start supporting your customers when and where they need it by being notified when they start conversations about your company and its products

- Encourage conversation around your products and services by showing that you’re listening

- Respond directly to your community of customers to inspire more passion for your products and services

- Make your products & services discoverable

- Increase the visibility of your products and services to more people who care

RSS is Real Simple Syndication. You subscribe to an rss feed that updates every time something new happens. You can use our feed in your favorite RSS reader.
For a fun explanation of RSS check out this video.

You can set up a feed based on companies, topics, products, tags... Just about everything.

We're all about open conversation here at Satisfaction so we're not going to delete a post or reply just because someone says something negative. However, there are a few instances where we will delete a post or reply:
- SPAM
- Inappropriate (as deemed by us)
- Abuse (as deemed by us)
- Crass commercialism (as deemed by us)

If you see a post that you think falls into one of these categories, click the "Flag for review" link, select the category it falls under and add a little explanation if you will to give us some further insight into why you think it needs to be reviewed. We'll review our Flagged items page from time to time and will delete items as we find necessary.






If you notice something that needs immediate attention, flag it and email us at info [at] getsatisfaction [dot] com with a link to the post.

If your company has a Satisfaction site, be sure to use your official email address to sign up with your user account. This way you'll automatically be set as an employee of your company if an official email domain has been set on your Accounts & Roles page in your Admin section. You must have "admin" status to access this page.