Get Satisfaction is one way to build API forums that enable productive conversations between an API owner and the developer ecosystem.
Simply engaging your customers in conversation won't earn you the respect of your community and make your customers happy. Conversations are just a start, it's what you do with them that matter. Get Satisfaction was built on the idea of not simply creating conversations, but creating value from conversations.
Get Satisfaction focuses on outcomes in order to create value, as opposed to the confusing and ineffective taxonomy of traditional forums, it is focused on conversations around four simple, outcome-oriented topic types. This helps keep conversations focused and productive.
Working together with an API community to build a dynamic, social knowledge-base helps developers find answers to their questions on their own time, and often times much faster through traditional support channels. Every answer is publicly searchable, so there's never a need to answer the same question twice. This results in a dramatic reduction in the cost of API support, while greatly improving customer satisfaction at the same time.
Different topics inside of forums are full of opinions, wishes and wants. Opening a community conversation about your API roadmap can help you gather valuable market data you can quickly fold into your API development cycle, communications strategy or program schedule.
Another area often overlooked, is that opening an forum and inviting discussion about your API deepens user engagement, increases the amount of user generated content, and benefits your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. (Hopefully you have one?)
Direct interactiion with your developers through open and transparent forums increases satisfaction, loyalty and builds community. This community will give prospective customers a peek behind the curtain of how your API treats developers, make them feel like they belong, and creates a 2-way street of communication your entire ecosystem will benefit from.
