A start-up called GetSatisfaction has a service that uses "crowdsourcing" to provide customer service, basically allowing the community of users of a product or service to help each other out. They write:

Satisfaction is people-powered customer service for everything. It's a Web service that uses "community-sourcing" to provide better support for products and services, with or without company involvement. Satisfaction's open discussion-based system allows companies, their customers and partners to work together to answer questions, identify problems and bugs, share great ideas for how to make products better, and connect in unexpected ways.

We're big fans of such community-powered services. And GetSatisfaction is in use by some 400+ organizations - from T-Mobile to Twitter to Linden Labs (Second Life), ZDnet and others. Some of the instances of GetSatisfaction look pretty new and do not yet have much content, but Apple is one that looks active.

For public sector focused groups, I think GetSatisfaction also looks like a great solution, for example, someone answered the question "How do I report that a streetlight is out?" in the GetSatisfaction space for the City of Ann Arbor. I can imagine that a lot of NGOs and even government agencies could tap into their communities of devoted supporters, fans, retired experts and others to provide some really valuable information using this.

You can see a more in depth reflection on GetSatisfaction by Tim O'Reilly in O'Reilly Radar.

Their own blog is at http://blog.getsatisfaction.com/

And who can't like name ?


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