GetSatisfaction Announces 2012 Winners of Customer Service Awards

In an effort to leverage the power of love this Valentine’s Day, the great folks at GetSatisfaction today released the winners/recipients of the 2012 Love Your Customers Awards. GetSatisfaction is an online community software company designed to get people talking with the brands and help move the conversation along. With the Love Your Customers awards, the team hopes that it will help recognize and celebrate what they call “daring feats of customer empowerment and support”. Brands awarded will have demonstrated continued excellence in social support, marketing, and “general community awesomeness” (their words)–everything that GetSatisfaction promotes on their site and what their software is designed to achieve.

The timing of this award is anything but coincidental. This on the heels of the most recent Community Manager Appreciation Day and also the release of their insight survey about community management–they surveyed some of the top community managers in the industry to help determine what are some emerging trends on the horizon. You can view the entire presentation here on SlideShare.

But let’s get back to the awards…GetSatisfaction looked over 64,000 communities to find the most shining examples of caring community managers and happy customers and from their results, they came up with the following 13 awards:

The Put a Ring on It Award: StumbleUpon
While GetSatisfaction loves their customers, the rationale behind this award is based on StumbleUpon’s demonstration  to support one of their customers propose to his girlfriend through an elaborate setup.

The “It Takes a Village” Award: Pampers
According to GetSatisfaction, Pampers’ community displays an honest, candid, and personal attitude towards their customers and make it a “safe space” for discussion.

The Lead by Example Award: Carmex–Paul Woelbing, President of Carma Labs
When the company was founded in the 1930s, its founder Alfred Woelbing recognized the importance of good customer service. 75 years later, this tradition of caring for customers as if they were  small business continues.

The Instant Gratification Award: IZEA
IZEA connects social media publishers with advertisers allowing them to monetize their activity. Through the IZEA GetSatisfaction community, publishers can find a four-year old, indexed knowledge base to find the answer to virtually any question quickly.

The Flippin’ Awesome Mobile Support Award: Flipboard
Flipboard knew that their customers are all mobile and knew it needed to come up with a way to integrate support into the in-app browsing experience. The result is direct access to all their user guides, a bustling community, and a last resort contact form. Quick resolution times and more time spent inside the app!

The Richard Simmons Award for Unwavering Motivational Support and Cheerleading Excellence: MapMyFitness
Clearly the longest award name ever…but in this award, the MapMyFitness community is passionate about improving their health and getting into shape. The service’s support team knows that every customer interaction is a chance to inspire one of their customers to take an extra step or ride an extra mile. So their service staff goes the extra mile no matter how detailed or specific the needs.

The Uber Fan Award for Best Customer Champions Ever-Ever: OMGPOP
OMGPOP has a great group of vocal brand ambassadors who are passionate about the gaming platform. Using these champions, newbies and other users with problems and questions will be helped just like OMGPOP employees. Since launching this initiative, OMGPOP has seen an 80% decrease in daily support requests.

The International Language of Love Award: Yola
Yola helps businesses around the globe build professional websites in any language. It’s fitting then that Yola’s customers often need support in their preferred language. Rather than going the automated translation route, Yola invested in 6 different communities in French, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, and English and has fluent speakers managing each one taking into account local customs, colloquials, and cultural sensitivity.

The Ringmaster of the Year Award: Mozilla Messaging, Roland Tanglao and Team
Roland Tanglao isn’t an ordinary community lead: in addition to taming community of 133,000 customers, he’s passionate about helping other community managers succeed. Roland is always there to help.

The Grace Under Fire Award: AMC Theatres
When the moment of a social media crisis strikes, being slow to respond to it can mean the difference between “chaos and pandemonium”. That’s why AMC Theatre’s social media team is ready. They’ve been successful in stemming the tide of negative sentiment arising from a backlash regarding increased ticket prices. As a result, while they didn’t change back the prices, dozens of their customers helped spread AMC’s response and allowed them to get their message out there beyond the community “walls”

The All Hands Award for Employee Engagement: Box
More than 100 Box employees are active in their customer community, lending expertise from across the company, empowering any employee to be a spokesperson. It’s absolutely clear that the team at Box plays by the first rule of social business: people want to connect with people, not businesses.

The Mum’s The Word Award: Kiddicare
Kiddicare, the UK’s largest online retailer of baby gear, used their GetSatisfacation community to ask mums what they wanted out of a mobile site and the on-the-go shopping experience. Using this same community and GetSatisfacation, Kiddicare was able to cut inbound support requests by email down by 30% and also raise First Call Resolution from 60% to 98%!

The Lifetime Achievement Award for Exceptional Customer Support: Intuit’s Mint.com
When dealing with sensitive financial information, it’s absolutely important that your customers know you can be trusted. Mint.com embraced the trust-building power of community early on and continues to rinforce trust by resolving problems quickly and genuinely engaging with customers, going so far as implementing multiple product changes based on their feedback.

Congratulations to all the winners of the 2012 Love Your Customers Awards from GetSatisfacation. It’s nice to know that there are businesses out there that care about their customers.