Wendy Lea

Meet Wendy Lea, the new CEO of Web 2.0 customer service site, Get Satisfaction. Lea brings a breadth of knowledge to Get Satisfaction — a former VP of marketing for Siebel and then an angel investor, Lea seems to understand what makes enterprises tick. She will be taking over the chief operating role for Thor Muller, one of the founders of the company. Muller will continue on as chief technology officer for Get Sat.

I had the opportunity to pick Lea’s brain a bit this week. She was a great sport considering she is only two weeks into the new gig. Here’s a snippet of our conversation:

CRM: What’s the transition been like so far?

Lea: Fun. It’s all good. You know the success we have had on the consumer side. Mid-last year, company sign-ups have really punched there. We’ve got an average of 75 [companies] coming in a day. We have a total of 12,000 in the system. Some are long tail. Some are big, big brands. It’s a fun time for us even with all the craziness around the company. The value proposition is strong because it is about reducing costs and getting closer to the customer.

CRM: So what’s on tap next for Get Satisfaction?

Lea: The trick is finding the right feature set and price points so we can maintain a good set of self-service customers and address what I would call the high-end professional customers, which, for them, is more about integration with their own sites and with CRM systems and with the community systems that they have already purchased. They want us on the front end to create communities and push feedback through and push through their customer service solution sets.

We aren’t a whole product. There is no one whole product. Because of the economic aspect and the consumer sensitivity that we create for companies, it seems — keep in mind, I’m only on week two — that the bigger brands, in particular, that allow themselves to take part are keen to re-engage. They are not just saying “come to our site” but are listening. And for some, we are their sole customer service solution.

CRM: How are things evolving?

Lea: It reminds me a bit of when SFA was trying to integrate with the ERP systems. We had to become part of a bigger system. Now that’s passe, of course. Now in service and support — maybe because of the proliferation and growth of online business, customer service as a category is fragmenting and coming back together again. It fragmented because of community-building products and because of all the new technologies that are available that lowered the cost of this stuff. As for the old dog-eared, expensive systems, in talking to customers I’m hearing that they want to supplement or take those systems down. They don’t see them as part of the future relative to certain classes of their customers.

CRM: So how do you move forward with social media and the enterprise?

Lea: For me, seeing the social media aspect applied so elegantly to a real business problem, I love that — To see it finally applied in a precise and measurable way to help an enterprise reboot, regroup, and get reconnected.I think social media is growing up. Now people like us, Get Satisfaction — but there are plenty of others –are bringing high value and cost-saving values to companies like Proctor & Gamble and Comcast. It’s not just consumer companies— it’s a wide spectrum. We aren’t here to celebrate. There’s real work to do to figure out the service and enterprise. I know I have to use the SaaS model as part of our business model and figure out how to serve big enterprise companies that way. Salesforce did it and Netsuite did it. There’s no reason why we can’t. The difference is that we started so much on the consumer side and now we are trying to convert that and it’s more complicated.

Lea told me that Get Satisfaction has some interesting projects with big enterprise clients in the hopper. She promised to give more details once she’s had more time under her belt. I look forward to the news — Something tells me that once she gets going, Lea isn’t afraid to make a splash.