Get Satisfaction, Or Else… →
Jason Fried of 37signals rips Get Satisfaction a new one for its extortionist messaging and practices. It’s completely deserved. I’m glad someone finally expressed this so completely and so well.
The entire premise of Get Satisfaction is a bit off. Customers get the idea, through Get Satisfaction’s misleading messaging and the customers’ own misunderstanding, that this is a valid place to complain to a company or ask support questions. And when the company doesn’t respond (since this isn’t their support/feedback channel and they may not even know about it), the customers frequently feel wronged or ignored.
Even if they didn’t have so much extortion in their messaging, the entire premise is highly questionable. But the language is pretty appalling. If a company hadn’t yet signed up with them, the language on their site said this until a few minutes ago:
[company name] has not yet committed to open conversations about its products or services.
They quickly changed it after this prominent blog post criticized it. It now reads:
No one from [company name] has sponsored, endorsed or joined the conversation yet.
Ultimately, Get Satisfaction puts an undue burden on the companies that are being misleadingly represented on the service. Why should we be responsible for monitoring your site? What if there were a few more sites like yours? Are we supposed to monitor them all? What if that’s not how we want to offer support?