How can Get Satisfaction be used to lower existing support costs?

Hi, jelgie! Actually, this was one of the very first ideas we had for Get Satisfaction -- that if companies could put public conversation (via GSFN) in front of private conversation (via email) it would dramatically change the way they interacted with their customers and would save them $$$ by cutting down on repetitive email support, too.

We definitely saw what RightNow was successfully doing with their CustHelp product -- pushing static FAQs in front of an "email us" link to stop people from emailing -- and realized that we could do a much more Web 2.0 version of that, by placing the community in front of the email/ trouble ticket funnel.

That's what we built our widgets for, an example of which can be seen here on the Timbuk2 "Customer Service" page. Try trying in a question -- you'll see that it's intercepted by answers from the community, and only if your question is truly a new one do you need to go ahead and post it (again, publicly.) People who have a genuinely private question can and do still ask it via email, since there's a link on that page -- we just get the widgets, and the community, out in front of that.

That widget came from here, but you can swap in any name in the URL in place of "timbuk2" and it will work for whatever company you want. We're working on building more widgets like this, and exposing these in more places around our site so people find them easier.

We've heard, anecdotally from companies that use them, that their support costs have dropped around 40% because of the time saved when they don't have to answer each question individually via email. Not to mention, you get to interact with your community for the first time, something RightNow absolutely doesn't provide.