Costumer service and support are important issues when trying to keep long time users on your application. The users searching for support are usually the most interested in using your service, and if you can solve their problems and clear their doubts, they will become your most loyal costumers.

There are many ways to give customer service and they depend primarily of your kind of application. Some might offer their application free and charge for support, others might give you a free call number and, in some cases, you might just need to leave you email or put a contact form online. Basically you have to consider if your costumers demand support, if your application has a monthly-fee, or if it is just a free tool or plugin you released and don’t have much time to support it actively.

Most of the we applications through out the web fit on the last case, and so does TwitterNotes. I occasionally have time to spend on answering questions and fixing some bugs, there’s no way I can offer 24/7 support. However I didn’t just wanted to leave out an email. So, I was looking for something where I could keep a record of previous issues and, at the same time, enable discussions to rise from random topics.

Get Satisfaction

Although the usual choice for this is either a discussion board or a mailing list, I decided to try out a new costumer service application that I had discover. I found Satisfaction due to a feature I already mentioned here: their registration phase supports hCards profiles to help fill out the form. Unfortunately, they could had also helped by using hCard on their users profiles, but I wanted to try out the service anyway. So, I created a site for TwitterNotes’ community.

Anyone can create a costumer service there for a company or a product. Later on owners of the product can claim the site to get involved, by proving their identity to the Satisfaction staff. As soon as the site is created anyone can join and create a discussion topic. There are four types of topics: questions, ideas, problems or just plain talk; and you can also tag the topic Then anyone can reply to the topic, or just follow the replies. There is one feature that I felt was a very nice addition to the conversations, each message can have the feeling of the author attached to it. This is great when you want to give the best support possible, since you can adequate your response better.

The hole Satisfaction website has a gorgeous classic look and it will become a must have service and soon as they can gather a bigger number of users and supporters. So far it has been a good experience, although TwitterNotes is a simple tool and it isn’t the kind of application that generated much discussion around it. But it worked well when I needed to gather some feedback and when users wanted to express some situations. And as I said, it still isn’t a wide known and used platform.

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