Articulate: “Serious About Listening to its User Base”

Back in May, I was incredibly proud to learn that our support site had been named one of the 10 Best Support Sites of 2007 by the Association of Support Professionals (you might have noticed the logo now proudly displayed in the footer across the site).

I recently received my copy of the printed report, highlighting our site and the other winners.

The introduction to the report is all about how Web support has evolved over the past decade — how now, more than ever, sites are designed by listening to customers and by collecting feedback continuously to improve and evolve the sites to meet customer needs:

Fast forward ten years, and the notion of successful Web support is all about robust user communities, satisfaction metrics, personal feedback, and enhancing the whole post-sales relationship. Yes, there are still support sites whose developers don’t pay much attention to customer voices. But few people believe these are state-of-the-art sites, least of all the customers who visit once or twice and then go away forever.

The transformation is especially clear with every one of this year’s winners, and it’s useful to see how many variations on the ‘voice of the customer’ themes these winning sites display. We found at least six different ways that the developers of these top sites have been gathering and using customer feedback.

One of the six ways that’s highlighted in the report? You guessed it: The Contact Gabe form.

I’m honored to be featured in this report. And yes, we really do listen!

(Quoted text and scan excerpted from pages 3 and 6, respectively, of The Year’s Ten Best Web Support Sites, 2007 Edition, with permission to republish granted by the publisher, the Association of Support Professionals. Thanks, Jeff!)