I signed up PinoyTattoos.com for GetSatisfaction a few days ago in an effort to cut down on redundant emails, create transparency with my customers, and cultivate an idea farm.

Get Satisfaction is a direct connection between people and companies that fosters problem-solving, promotes sharing, and builds up relationships. Thousands of companies use this neutral space to support customers, exchange ideas, and get feedback about their products and services. Get Satisfaction is open, transparent, and free. You’re free to ask, free to answer, and free to start a new conversation. Everyone is invited and encouraged to participate: companies, employees, customers — anyone with an opinion, an answer, or something to say.

The GetSatisfaction business model is pretty much taking your business reputation hostage. Not that it’s a bad thing, it’s pretty smart. Yammer and Yelp do something similar. These companies feed the most basic human need, communication with others. No business will be able to stop anyone from talking. They can only try to manage their own reputation. Basically, if a business wants manage their page on the service, they pay. Brilliant.

So far, so good in revamping my customer service process. I just have a few customer email entry points I need to clean up. There’s an order form, photo upload form, tattoo artist directory submission form, and 2 GetSatisfaction widgets. This doesn’t include Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, IM, and etc. Way too much. I have to consolidate all that.

In a move to practice what i preach, I installed Kampyle on my PinoyTattoos.com website. I thought it would be a good idea to also add it on this site as well. After poking around the user interface for 3 minutes (2.5 minutes too much) looking how to add a new website profile, I gave up hit the Live Support link to chat with someone who can point me in the right direction. I’ve had great customer service chat experience with AT&T and Comcast in the past and prefer it rather than calling.

I filled out the form and noted my issue. Once I hit submit, the pop-up closed. I tried it on Firefox & IE with the same end result. I assume that “Live Support” is off line. I’ve seen other companies have a status of “Online” or “Offline” next to their “Live Support” link.

If your not online to support the live support chat as advertised (I did this on a Sunday morning), then take off the link. There are live support chat applications that will either remove or display online/offline status. Failure to do so will result in an unsatisfied customer.

Woke up this morning and saw an email form one of my webhosts:

Good morning folks,

As of about 9:08 AM EST, Fused Network went offline due to a networking issue at the facilty our infrastructure resides in. At this time we don’t know the full details of the outage however all systems do appear to be go at this time. We will be issuing a full statement on our status blog as information comes available about the nature of the outage, what is being implemented to prevent similar occurrences in the future and what we’re doing here at Fused to ensure communication continues even during massive problems (despite how infrequent they are).

In the past we had made moves to decentralize our blog, community and status systems onto separate servers so that we could easily move them off to external networks during extended outtages to keep information flowing. We’ll be moving them to completely external networks during the next week to ensure even in the worst of scenarios that we’re able to communicate with you.

As always during issues — updates are available on our status blog at http://status.fusednetwork.com
We’ll have a specific write-up regarding this event there for your perusal and additional updates will be posted to it as they become available.

Thank you for your time & patience.

David McKendrick
Fused Network
1-888-282-0003 / support@fusednetwork.com

This is great customer service because it’s pro-active and honest. Most of their customers probably did not notice the outage (like me) but would like to know if there was one.

Here are some transparency tips for a 1-man small business that’s bound for unintentional screw-ups

1) Set the expectation with your customers
Be clear as to what the possible issues could be with your service or product.

• Item may look slightly different from what is photographed.
• Larger items take longer to produce and will lead to longer fulfillment time.

2) Get your customers to trust you
If they know and trust you, they will be have more compassion when things go wrong. Keep a blog about your business & some personal activities.

• Your a single dad and this is your side business that you only work on during the weekends or late nights.
• You were sick for a week.
• Photos of yourself. Gone are the days of avatars. Show your mug even if your not a supermodel.

3) When sh!t hits the fan, be honest
Like what FusedNetwork did, explain what the issue was and your steps to prevent it.

• Communicate to your customers as the issue is happening. You may not have all the details but acknowledge the issue and advise that it’s being addressed.
• Once the issue is resolved, provide non-technical root cause analysis to your customers. Provide a statement of the issue, business/customer impact, root cause, and prevention action items.

3) Take feedback and treat it like bling
Ever receive feedback and just archive it in your gmail account without doing anything about it? I have….we should be at least be responding with a personal email.

• Design your feedback form to have key fields that you can use for analysis. Don’t just have a free form field. Create specific categories like “Product Suggestion” or “Bug”.
• Import all your feedback into Excel to breakdown percentages. Better yet, sign up for an online feedback analysis service like Kampyle.