Case Study #4: Can You Get a Little Satisfaction? You Don’t Have to Be Mick Jagger – Yola.com Did! Customer Service Social Media

Natalie Petouhoff

Jan 22 2010

If you have been following this blog, you might remember that I posted this a while back. But with the new year here, I thought it might be good to repeat some of the case studies while adding new ones… just incase you missed them or incase you wanted a refresher as you start down the path of providing a solution to your company social media needs!

Remember that great song… “Can’t get no… Satisfaction…” Some how I think that is the national anthem of most customers. Why is it so freaking hard to get satisfaction?

I found out it’s not really that hard if you have getsatisfaction.com In an interview with the company’s CEO, Wendy Lea and her team, I learned a lot about how they are helping companies hear and respond to the voice of the customer…

GetSatisfaction is the brainchild of Thor Muller, Amy Muller and Lane Becker. They wanted to make a difference. They wanted to use software to enable a better world. There in the heart of South Park – they came up with a way to do that.

Lane

Thor…………………….Amy…………………Lane……….and…………Wendy

How can companies use GetSatisfaction? Depending on the customer/user’s goal /topic here’s how it can work:

Today they have collectively pretty impressive stats: 24,500 Communities, 15,888 Companies, 17,248 employees working together to improve 24,283 products and services. Companies like Zappos.com, P&G, Twitter, Six Apart, Mint, Microsoft and Mozilla are finding value — and satisfaction by using getsatisfaction.com

Here’s the site’s home page. Most customers type in the name of a company and the site that corresponds to the company comes up. Get satisfaction website

Yola.com is one of the many companies that is using getsatisfaction as their solution to interact and serve their customers. It is a company to watch… at least according to Business Week… and they otta know… they track the best of the up and comers…

Yola.com is a on-line website builder that makes it easy to create, publish and host a website. They simplified the process so that the “customer experience” of having a website was much more enjoyable! But as all companies know… customer service is the new sales… so grrrrreat customer service is a must for positive word-of-mouth, continued sales and rapid growth.

So how could a company provide amazing service and not break the bank? Its customer base was rapidly growing– its target market — individuals and small businesses could conceivably need alot of help! Yola.com established a customer community at getsatisfaction.com. The result? 2 million customers are supported by only six people! And the community users like it– 5-to-1 over email support!

CEO Vinny Lingham requests that all employees at Yola.com participate in the community. That makes the community lively– with support from customer champions- Super Users and customers– especially when Vinny answers questions himself! As of June 2009 Yola estimates that they have had a 60-70% reduction in customer service tickets since the end of 2008. Vinny was just on the cover of Entrepreneur Magazine — as being a brilliant business man and lot’s of accolades for his ability to raise funding!

Yola’s NPS (Net Promoter Score) is also an important metric to its management, its board of directors and its investors. Yola carefully tracks the movement in NPS and provides weekly reports. What’s interesting is that right after a crisis- when you would normally think the NPS might go down… Yola has seen the opposite… instead of a dip, they see a marked increase in NPS.

The feedback they get is that customers appreciate getting an instant reply when they report a problem. Customer feel that Yola cares enough to be in communication with their customers and getting regular feedback and information as the company works to solve the issue– is important to sustaining that relationship. And to top it off– they love getting an email when the issue is solved. The principle of NOW and continuous communication is testament to the power of social media and to the customer experience and customer loyalty.

Click here to link to the Forrester Case Study on-line!

See…. getting a little satisfaction isn’t that hard… you just have to know where to find it! Right Mick? (If you have not seen this rare footage of Mick singing Get Satisfaction on youtube… its worth a click!)

Learn. Share. Grow.

p.s. Here’s how customers are using getsatisfaction: They can ask a question, share an idea, report a problem, get praise… and much, much more… log onto www.getsatisfaction.com to experience it!

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This is part of a series of case studies on customer service and how to use social media to transform the customer experience, reduce costs and transform your business. It is based on the best practices doc: Best Practices: Five Strategies For Customer Service Social Media Excellence.

Learn. Grow. Share. npetouhoff@forrester.com or follow me at @drnatalie on Twitter.com

Other documents in this series…The first part of each listing is the link is to the Forrester Case Study or document and the second part of each title has a link to the story on my blog– that way if you are not a Forrester client (yet 😉 ) you can see some of the results and start taking action!

Case Study 1: ACT! By Sage Uses Social Media To Transform The Customer Experience

Case Study 2: Lenovo Takes Ownership Of Social Media To Reduce Customer Service Costs

Case Study 3: InfusionSoft Transforms Their Business With Social Media

Best Practices in Social Media: Five Strategies Customer Service Professionals