Recently active topics in Get Satisfaction tagged with customer service

We have heard this question raised in regards to the open conversations happening in Get Satisfaction between companies and customers.

Asking customers for their feedback and getting them involved in the process isn't about asking for free labor, it's about empowering customers to have a voice. In doing so they can collaborate with the company to help make the company's products and services better meet the customer's needs, they create more transparency in the relationship and in the process build trust. Often times customers do quite innovative things with a product that the company might not have thought of on their own. In these cases, customers are the best source of answers and input.

In Get Satisfaction, anyone can create a community around any company even if the company's not involved. The hope here, though, to is make a win-win for companies and customers where they're all engaging in productive conversations. It is in no way intended to replace one-on-one communications -- there are times when that's the best course of action. However, we have found that everyone wins when answers are exposed to all users, answers come from company reps as well as customers--who might have a different perspective--and companies aren't having to answer the same question over and over and thus have more time to build a better product.

Since Thor first presented on "Customer Service is the New Marketing" at SXSW and then followed up with a post about it on our blog, we've had a steady drumbeat of interest on the subject from people across a wide spectrum of industries, companies and job titles.

Clearly, the topic has struck a nerve. We knew it was a subject we were obsessed with, but we had no idea so many people felt so passionately about what at a glance seems like it might make for pretty mundane subject matter. People from all sorts of industries have contacted us, wanting to share their stories about how to make customer service a better experience all around, or asking for tips and suggestions about how to get their own organizations to do customer service differently.

And, hey, we're a customer service organization, right? Give the customers what they want, and what our community wants is a chance to learn, organize, and share around some of these emerging ideas. And so we're announcing our first "Customer Service is the New Marketing" Summit, to be held in mid-November here in lovely San Francisco, California (exact date and location to be determined shortly.)

We're currently hard at work putting together a full roster of speakers, pulling from a variety of industries (and not just the usual Web 2.0 crowd, though we'll have some of them, too), all of whom are finding ways to make customer service more meaningful for their organizations. We'll round out the day with some collaborative workshops, some probing interviews, some group discussion, plenty of food and of course the opportunity to mingle and network. More information on all this soon, we promise.

But first, of course, we want to hear from you: Would this be something you would be interested in? Who would you like to see speak? What kinds of other attendees would you want to meet? What topics would you find the most valuable? Let us know!