We all know that customer service is a pain to deal with in most cases; waiting on hold to speak to someone in a noisy call center, not getting your problem solved and just going in circles. Some companies are better at this than others with online forums and then there are small companies that haven't even setup any form of customer service yet. Regardless of the situation, Satisfaction aims to heal your customer service woes.
Crafted by an experienced team, including people from Adaptive Path (the company that made Measure Map, a web app for tracking site traffic, which was bought by Google and was integrated into what is now Google Analytics) and Rubyred Labs, Satisfaction is the Cambrian House of customer service in a sense. Similar to a forum, there are several sections or in this case companies up for discussion. If the company you need help with isn't listed, you can add it yourself.
Let's say you have a general question regarding an Apple product, such as looking for a compatible scanner...
You can just hop into the Apple section, search for any related topics and if there aren't any, submit your own. Satisfaction lets you submit your topic, add relevant tags and products/services, as well as flag it as a question, idea, problem or just plain talk. Once your topic is published, others can easily reply and hopefully your question will be answered shortly. Satisfaction also takes employees into account, so you will be able to see if anyone that replied to your topic works for the company you have an issue with.
Replies may be "marked as useful" by users and the best ones float to the top, similar to up-voting good comments on Hacker News (née YCombinator Startup News).
In its most basic form, Satisfaction isn't much more than a forum aimed at people needing a venue to discuss problems, ideas, issues and form a community around customer service for various companies. However, Satisfaction's cheerful look and feel gives me the impression that it will facilitate this better than any forum would be able to.
There are a few reasons one might use Satisfaction as compared to a company's own forums, if they have any. First off, it's a third-party site, voiding the possibility of substantial bias in replies as you are interacting with the general e-populace. For example, Apple has been known to lock or even delete threads for issues it initially didn't want to face, such as those random shutdown problems on MacBooks. Second, Satisfaction is a one-stop-shop for all your customer service needs. Tell people about your MacBook's flickering screen one day, get a response from Tim O'Reilly to your question about how O'Reilly Media draws those cute animals on the covers of their books the next. Versatility like no other.
Satisfaction is still in beta and funded by angel money with future plans to monetize with possible topic-relevant advertising and "selling services to companies to help them monitor trends and communicate with customer" as Venture Beat noted.
Do you think Satisfaction will be a success? If not, what else does it need to succeed? As for my own feedback, I think Satisfaction could use a better way to find companies. There are so many companies that scrolling and pagination gets a little annoying. Perhaps a basic company search bar is in order.