Hey companies! What kinds of information about your customers would you like to get out of Get Satisfaction?

To clarify, Lane is talking about DATA. Numbers! What do you need, as a company, to assess the effectiveness of communicating with your customers using Get Satisfaction?

I'm glad those were helpful. 8-)

Here are a few more:

1. Can you show me a customer's profile that's restricted to that customer's GSFN activity just for my company or my product? By profile, I mean:

a. customer's activity duration
(time elapsed from the date of their first GSFN activity for my company/product and date of their last GSFN activity for my company/product) expressed in days, weeks, months, or years.

b. number of topics started, possibly broken down by topic type (question, idea, discussion, problem)

c. number of replies, number of comments

d. number of replies marked by others as being helpful, a good point, solving the problem, etc.

e. overall mood of the user's posts (total smiley faces, total frowny faces, etc.)

f. number of times they've used "Twitter-this" with one of my company's or product's topics

g. number of topics they're currently following

2. Can you show me the same customer profile but in time series format so I can see activity over time? For example:

a. number of topics started per week / month / quarter / year (so I can see if there are patterns of behavior)

b. number of replies, number of comments per week / month / quarter / year

and so on.

3. Can you show me the same customer profile, but this time aggregated by product (meaning instead of just looking at one customer, I'm now looking at all customers that have commented, replied, viewed, or otherwise acted on topics related to a particular product)?

4. If you are collecting location information on the users, I'd love to see summaries that show me where the users are coming from

5. What time of day and day of week are there the most activity from my users? Ideally, I'd like the customer support staff to be online at those times.

6. Can you show me most common search terms used? This will help me refine topic FAQs

7. Can you show me most frequently viewed topic pages? The least viewed topic pages So I know what people are interested in.

8. Assuming I'm allowed to define what 'active user' means, can you show me how many active users we have per day?

If the number of active users is consistently going up over time, I may need to assign more people to the forum. (An example of what I mean by 'active user' can be -- any GSFN user that has posted a comment, reply, twittered, overheard, starred, searched, viewed a topic, etc. in the last 7 days)

9. How many new users join the forum per day? By 'join' I mean, they had their first GSFN activity related to my product or company.

mdy, you constantly amaze us here at The Satisfactory. Thank you very much for all these great metrics ideas. We will definitely be using your suggestions to shape the development of a number of tools and features in the works.

Forgot to add: Some kind of report that provides metrics about the topic tags would be helpful too, as this gives added insight into what areas of a product or service constantly require attention.

Given the way tags are sometimes (mis)used in GSFN, some form of filtering may be needed to:
a. exclude tags that don't make sense and/or
b. include only tags created by designated users

'Designated users' can be company representatives, or anyone that a company rep has added as a contact, or a company-specified list of users.

Getting tag-related statistics in time-series format may also be helpful for companies that have very cyclical patterns.

Hi. I don't know how feasible this idea is, and there's a good chance this is too 'out there', but here goes...

If I were a customer support manager and I was tracking the activity and performance of support employees in GSFN, I'd be interested in more than just their actual performance; I'd also be interested in how their performance compared to the company's targets.... so a set of Target v. Actual Reports would be interesting.

For example, possible targets (I guess some people might call them 'target service levels') would be:

1. The first reply from a support employee should be posted within 8 hours of a problem being reported.

2. 80% of problems categorized as 'simple' should be solved within 24 hours of the problem being reported.

3. 50% of problems categorized as 'moderate' should be solved within 72 hours.

Well, you get the idea...

Obviously, this implies that:

1. additional, company-specific metadata would be specified by the company admin, such as problem categories and time targets.

2. additional topic metadata would be made available and visible to company employees, such as the actual category per problem (I don't think customers need to see that).

I suspect something like this will have to wait until Version 4 or Version 5 of the site since there are long-reaching implications for adding this kind of metadata... but figured I'd mention it just the same.

To me... the most important think would be to find which are the most common problems, but this would require better ability to link problems together so that we aren't looking at duplicates.

"+0.5" for everything mdy said. Why only 0.5? I like the suggestions, and I'd certainly be curious about all of that information if it happened to be available, but it's hard to say how much value we, Zenbe, would actually derive from it.

Half (or more) of what mdy is asking for would seem to be more interesting to the employees of GSFN than to Zenbe. So let me break out of the box for a minute ...

If you *really* want to bring value to Zenbe, than give us ways to understand our customers needs as they specifically relate to us and our product. For example, we need to know specific stuff like:
- What mobile devices do they use (iPhone? Blackberry? etc.)
- To what extent do they collaborate using calendars?
- Are they familiar with the notion of "widgets" in web pages?
- What kinds of documents do they regularly share with colleagues?
- etc...

Obviously GSFN isn't going to collect this information from all their users. However if there were a way for us, Zenbe, to say this was information we would like to have for users of our forums, and if GSFN could help us collect that, it would be extremely useful.

To summarize: Provide a way for companies to specify additional profile information they wanted to collect from users, put a UI in place that gently encouraged users to provide that information, and then give us reporting tools for displaying the information collected.

Seems like a perfect "premium" for-pay feature, if you ask me.

Robert, it sounds like you want a full-on survey system, rather than just added features to Get Satisfaction. I wish I had one to recommend... Good ideas, though! It's possible that we will be able to design a lightweight way to ask for additional info specific to a company's needs sometime soon.

@cameron/scott: True, my idea is more of a meta feature than a specific feature request, which is why I was intentionally vague about how it might manifest in the UI. I'm sure there are lots of possible ways of extracting information from users. Scott's idea about games is one, a simple poll widget on the company's GSFN poll page is another, or simply adding company-specific fields to the user's profile might be yet another. I don't really know what the right solution is, although my personal preference would be some sort of simple polling widget. Maybe allow us to add a poll widget to our GSFN home page (and our zenbe.com website!), and have a "polls" tab in GSFN where we manage current and past polls we'd created. Polls are relatively easy to implement, everyone knows how they work and are familiar with them, and are functionally light-weight and general purposes enough that almost any company should be able to find them useful.

Anyhow, mdy has done a great job of answering the question, "With GSFN's current feature set, what functionality would be useful?". I thought I'd take a stab at the other half, which is, "Ignoring what GSFN currently does, what tools would a company find useful when interacting with their users?".

Howdy folks,

I'm a fan of mdy's suggestions, many of his/her requests echo my own. Fundamentally, I am interested in knowing how well GetSatisfaction is helping my customers resolve their issues. Such metrics will help us decide whether to make GetSatisfaction our primary form of support, or just a secondary self-help area that is an enhancement to our customer service offerings.

The advantage to GetSatisfaction is also significant: if using GetSatisfaction as our primary means of CS allows us to provide excellent service at a lower cost, it's a great story all around.

Primarily, I would like to know:
1. How many people are using the search widget on my site?
2. How many unique visitors and pageviews per day are each of my topic pages getting?
3. What are people searching for?
4. How long to problems remain unanswered?
5. How many users leave responses?
6. How many problems are resolved by other users (non-employees)?

These numbers are so important that even having a CSV file containing these metrics on a daily basis would be a fantastic first step.

Are any of these metrics available today? What are your plans on offering this kind of data?

Cheers,
Gaurav