Social communities are instrumental to both social media and customer support strategy

Jive’s announcement this past week to focus more on Social Customer Service is further validation that customer communities are instrumental to both social media (marketing) and customer support strategy. Employee collaboration software offers an array of benefits for companies but increasingly what they are finding is that if they want to deliver not just on behind the firewall ROI but change their business in a way that can deliver sustainable competitive advantage, then they need to put the customer front and center.

It’s not enough to give your employees a better way to work… leading companies in every sector are discovering that they also need to deliver on a better way to collaborate with their customers!

If you will excuse me for taking a minute to pitch Get Satisfaction, this is exactly what we are entirely focused on, a better way for companies and customers to engage each other online.

People often ask me “why don’t you guys offer a help desk system?”. The answer is that while we offer a product that a business buys, the primary user is a customer and we don’t believe that pushing more stuff into a ticket based system, with the heavy workflow and attendent costs, is what will deliver a better company-to-customer experience.

I’m tempted to say that our mission is to make the help desk system less important to you, as a business, but in reality we hope to make it more important by focusing it on the issues that defy self-service help and customer-to-customer interaction.

With Get Satisfaction your customers get something better, and it’s not focused exclusively on complaints and problems. Instead of customer service around issue management we offer customer service through relationship management and what that means is that problems get resolved – certainly, this is a primary need – but questions get answered, positive feedback means doing more of what works, and questions get answered, by you, your advocates and other customers.

Get Satisfaction has as it’s core DNA that concept that a customer is at the center or a customer community. We offer a better, faster, and cheaper model than traditional enterprise software solutions, and perhaps most strikingly, we have delivered a platform that meets the needs of the very largest of companies, while also remaining approachable and productive for the smallest of startups.

I am glad to see Jive recognize that the Social Customer is an integral part of any social business. This won’t be easy for them or anyone else to deliver on, enterprise software doesn’t easily translate into strong customer experiences because it is a solution designed around a business process and employee experience first… but acknowledging that the Social Customer is the foundation is a good first start.

[Cross-posted at Venture Chronicles]