Get Satisfaction Wants To Spread Community (Widgets) Everywhere With Engage

Get Satisfaction was built around the importance of community to businesses. Now, with the launch of a new product called Get Satisfaction Engage, it wants to make those communities embeddable anywhere.

Basically, Engage is a new architecture for Get Satisfaction widgets, turning them into customizable versions of a company’s Get Satisfaction community. People can browse the new widgets without leaving whatever web page they’re on. That means all the discussion among a company’s customers, users, and fans will become more useful to people who aren’t a part of that community — including in a several contexts outside beyond the customer support arena where Get Satisfaction first made its name.

“You can infuse conversation into all of your web assets,” says CEO Wendy Lea.

Lea walked me through a couple of use cases last week. For one, community can become marketing tool, so that when people visit your website, they can browse through all the discussions about your brand and you products. Or it can become useful in e-commerce — where, at the moment someone is thinking about buying a product, they can actually ask the community any lingering questions, and browse the questions that have been asked and answered already.

The Get Satisfaction team also showed me the new widget creation process. One of the goals, they said, was to make it possible to create the widget without going to your IT department for help. You choose from six different widget templates, select which community components to include, and customize the look to match your company’s branding. You can also hide certain types of content, so that, for example, visitors to your website don’t see complaints. The whole process should only take a few minutes, resulting in a few lines of code that you add to your site.

Engage is part of a larger strategy called Get Satisfaction Anywhere, which aims to bring customer engagement to, yes, anywhere on the Web. One of the next steps, Lea says, is build more integration with CRM products.

Get Satisfaction says there are now more than 4 million people participating in 65,000 communities. For existing customers, Get Satisfaction plans to support the existing widget architecture for another six months while companies migrate to the new system.