GetSatisfaction describes itself as “a place where customers and companies can come together to answer each others questions: questions about shipping, pricing, fulfillment, the product itself.” It is a kind of social customer support site that lets people express their problems, questions, and wishes for the products they use, and the companies that make those products — as well as other users — to respond, in a more or less neutral environment. Employees from hundreds of companies, including the likes of Comcast, Microsoft, and Yahoo!, have joined in the discussion.
GetSatisfaction has released an API with the intention to “expose every part of the Get Satisfaction service, so that companies and customers alike who have clever ideas about how to integrate, build on top of, and/or extend the Get Satisfaction service can just do that.” The RESTful API, which uses Mashery services, offers OAuth for authentication as well as support for Atom, microformat-rich XHTML, or JSON. The resources available are as robust as advertised. Developers can query for companies, products, people — both employees and consumers — discussion topics, and replies, and new topics and replies can be posted through the API as well. For more details on the API, see our GetSatisfaction API profile.
Documentation for developers can be found at the GetSatisfaction developers site, and though all of the API’s functionality is described, and a savvy developer will be able to figure it out what they need to know, there is also an API product page hosted on GetSatisfaction itself. Here, in true GetSatisfaction style, developers and GetSatisfaction staff alike are fairly active, and the company has also provided helper libraries for PHP and Ruby, which should help bootstrap those who want to utilize the API.
GetSatisfaction is still a young company, but it’s been very good at facilitating surprisingly frank and productive conversations between companies of all sizes and their customers. The API offers a lot to companies that use GetSatisfaction, allowing them to integrate customer discussions and data into their own sites and online stores, and as the service grows we may eventually see that happen on a large scale.
Distributed product support services
©ProgrammableWeb.com 2009. All rights reserved.
Terms of Service | Privacy Policy
One Response to “GetSatisfaction API Connects Companies To Customers”
at 2:54 pm
The tool we use, HelpSpot http://www.userscape.com also has an extensive API. I think they may have helper libraries as well, but not sure.