Get Satisfaction

Get Satisfaction provides a platform allowing companies to build online communities in order to facilitate conversations between companies and their customers.  Founded in 2007, the San Francisco based company has approximately forty employees, and targets customers of all sizes with their community platform.  Get Satisfaction recently closed a $10M round of Series B financing, to bring their total of capital raised to $20.9M.

Get Satisfaction gets its customers create online communities where their customers can post questions, comments, and complaints that all community members can read. GS clients can respond to posts directly, and their customers can respond to each other. Community members can rate the responses based on how helpful they are.

Get Satisfaction provides its customers an easy to use platform that allows them to encourage community participation, provide valuable customer insights, and enhance customer loyalty. 

The approach GS takes to finding customer insights is to analyze the wealth of unstructured conversation data generated in their communities by adding metadata around it – things like keywords, products, sentiment, and other attributes.  The metadata is oriented around conversations in the form of the topics, of which Get Satisfaction collects 1.8 million topics a month across their roster of client communities.  Information they attach to categorize conversations include:

• Topic Type
• Title of Topic
• Topic Sentiment
• Topic Product/Service
• Keywords assigned by moderator

Adding this information makes conversation data more usable to enterprise line of business applications, like those of integration partners including:

• Salesforce.com
• Zendesk
• Assistly

GS makes it easy for community members to search knowledge bases and leverage dynamic FAQs to find answers to problems on their own, or by leveraging the knowledge of community members in real time conversations. Widgets are also provided to place access to knowledge base information on websites, Facebook, and on mobile devices - making the information more accessible to people looking for solutions.

Get Satisfaction includes tools to collect and prioritize product-specific customer feedback by adding a feedback tab to any (or every) page of a customer’s website.   And it recently upgraded its integration with Facebook by making it possible for administrators and customer service agents to take data from a wall and channel it into a Salesforce.com and worked as a case. 

Get Satisfaction powers sixty thousand online communities, with a total of 2.5 million registered members.  They are adding 106,000 new registered users a month. 12 million unique visitors come to their communities every month, generating 30 million page views.  Thirty percent of network traffic comes from outside the US.

There are different levels available to fit a variety of budgetary and functional needs:

• Free (adding 1,600 a month))
• $49/mo
• $99/mo
• Enterprise
  • $6K
  • $20K

The majority of their customers are B2C companies. Approximately 2,360 of the 60,000+ communities are fee-based; including 120 enterprise customers.  The average enterprise deal size is $27,000, and they average closing eight enterprise deals a month with a 27% conversion rate after prospects sign up for a 15-day free trial.  The close rate for standard community deals is 75% after trial signup, averaging 244 monthly conversions. 

The application is built on a multi-tenant architecture with Ruby on Rails, using Amazon cloud services.  Serving the community needs of a number of Fortune 500, as well as tens of thousands of smaller companies, the application is built serve a huge (and growing) number of members.

All in all, the competition in the online community space is only going to get more intense.  Players like Lithium, Jive and a few others will provide stiff competition, particularly at the high end of the market.  But Get Satisfaction has what it takes to be among the leaders.  They have an offering for all levels of business, which allows them to grow relationships with companies that can start at one end of their community offerings and move up as they mature.  And their recent deal with Salesforce.com to become a reseller allows them to offer CRM with community management and workflow - all in one single solution.   

The company has a lot of momentum, and we expect that to continue into the foreseeable future.