On The Internet, Everyone Can Hear You Complain

A San Francisco start-up called Get Satisfaction is the latest online ombudsman to try to mediate customer service complaints.

Get Satisfaction allows people to post feedback about their experiences with any company they choose, and it encourages companies to visit its site, www.getsatisfaction.com, to respond publicly. Since September, when the site began, people have posted complaints or comments regarding 2,000 companies, and 40 percent of the companies have answered, at no charge to either side.

The Internet is rife with sounding boards for the disgruntled, who have their choice of blogs, sound-off sites like Yelp and Epinions, and dedicated customer service sites like Get Satisfaction, PlanetFeedback and Complaints.com.

All this venting can bring about some productive results — happier customers, resolved disputes — but it remains to be seen whether the sites that serve as intermediaries can actually turn a decent profit.

Complaints.com and PlanetFeedback make money from advertisements; the founder of PlanetFeedback, Pete Blackshaw, said in an interview that he made little money from the site but ran it mainly as a hobby. Matthew Smith, the founder of Complaints.com, said his site was profitable, but would not offer specifics.

Get Satisfaction, which is backed by venture capital and aims one day to be financially stable, has little if any revenue and has not decided if it will sell ads; rather, its goal is to persuade companies to buy the software it has developed. The software helps companies communicate with customers. It also organizes data about the people talking about their products and what they are saying.

For now, companies that want to use Get Satisfaction can grab a free application, or widget, from its Web site and put it on their own sites. The software code in the widget then directs customers to the dialogue on Get Satisfaction. As with many start-ups, Get Satisfaction hopes to build an audience first and make money later.

The company asserts that the Internet can lead to better customer service dialogue — if people make reasonable complaints, customers can help one another solve problems. It can also make companies more open to acknowledging their mistakes and to fixing them.

“We want to create a Switzerland for companies and customers, with specific tools that allow people to get answers to their questions,” said Thor Muller, Get Satisfaction’s chief executive. “We want the best answers to rise to the top, and not get buried in online discussion forums.”

Mr. Muller is a serial entrepreneur who had run a Web design company, Rubyred Labs, with his wife, Amy, as a partner. They started Get Satisfaction last year with $1.3 million in venture capital from First Round Capital and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. The company was originally named Satisfaction Unlimited but is changing the name to match the Web address.

The first companies to respond to customers on the site are typically tech-oriented — like Twitter, the instant messaging service, and PBwiki, a collaborative software maker — but the site aims to serve a broad realm of consumer products. One early user is Timbuk2 Designs, which makes bags and briefcases.

“There were a lot of conversations going on outside of Timbuk2, on student blogs and other sites,” said Patti Roll, director for marketing at Timbuk2. “Get Satisfaction is a way for us to aggregate that into a format that’s easy to utilize.”

One Timbuk2 customer went to Get Satisfaction to complain about his effort to cancel an order for a custom-made bag. By the time he canceled, the bag had already been made.

“Another person, not an employee, responded first,” Ms. Roll said. “They said, ‘You’re complaining that the service was so fast that they made your custom bag so quickly?’ It’s exactly what we were hoping to see — customers communicating with customers. That’s really rich.” Ultimately, she said, Timbuk2 waived its policy and returned the customer’s money, giving the bag to charity.

Many people who study the business world say that companies need to be responsive to the new freewheeling discussions that consumers generate online. The risk, said Priya Raghubir, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, was that “by not engaging consumers in this environment, the mere fact you haven’t engaged them becomes public knowledge.”

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