A couple of years ago on-line feedback management services like GetSatisfaction and UserVoice started to provide wide-scale aggregation points for community discussion of brands, products and services and in doing so began shaking up the way customer service departments engaged with their customers. Then this year Twitter’s real-time public conversations added another dimension to this relationship and began further transforming the way companies communicate with their customers, especially with regards to ‘negative’ customer experiences.
However, there still seemed a pretty wide gap between help-desk type customer support, which is geared around ticketing and private one-to-one communications, and public support forums especially highly-visible and essentially unmoderated ones like GetSatisfaction.
So for a while now I’ve been waiting for these two worlds to properly acknowledge one another and for management tools to emerge that try to combine the different requirements
And it looks like they took a big step closer to each other this week with GetSatisfaction announcing a new integration model with ZenDesk (a web2.0 ticket-based helpdesk system) with GS’s authentication system FastPass providing the account linkage and a series of integration options providing the user experience.
This video explaining how it all works is definitely worth watching: Integrating a Customer Community into Your Support Mix.
