It’s fascinating how the internet is slowly becoming a catalyst that causes a paradigm shift in even the most stubborn, most stodgy company’s way of doing business. This is most noticeable in the banking industry–Typically, banks rely on transactions being inconvenient and time consuming to consequently be able to charge fees that make up a sizable chunk of their revenue. I mean, how many times have you been slapped with additional charges on your loan or bill payment because you were too lazy to go to the bank the day your payment was due?

The proliferation of online bill payment and other services such as fund transfer and balance checking is testament to how the internet could take a company by the balls, flip its model and make it web-enabled willingly or in most cases, unwillingly.

With the highly touted community-based and collaborative features of Web 2.0 and with traditional companies realizing the potential of how the internet can improve their business more and more, I think there’s no better time for startup internet companies to take advantage of the virtually untapped market that are the late adopters.

Sadly, more often than not, most startups are in a seemingly ‘monkey see, monkey do‘ model. Seriously, if I fucked a hooker for every time a startup company comes up with a digg, MySpace, Linked In, Face Book or YouTube rip-off, I’d be a ho-man petri dish of STD’s already.

Enter, Satisfaction: one of the few products nowadays where I see a lot of promise in. In a nutshell, Satisfaction is People-powered Customer Service for Absolutely Everything.

Led by a team composed of some of the people responsible for what is now Google Analytics, is an advanced forum of sorts with topics categorized by companies up for discussion.

If you find that the customer service concern topic doesn’t belong to a company currently listed on the site, you can simply go ahead and create a new company channel (In fact, I see that Terrence Pua and local startup Xackup, makers of Bandwagon and yet to be released Headphones have already created their own channel.)

Using Satisfaction is a no-brainer. Say for instance, you have a problem with virtually indelible dirt accumulating on your Macbook’s palm rest (The first actual problem I used Satisfaction for), all you need to do is navigate to Apple’s channel, see if there are already topics similar to your problem and if not, submit it. Once your problem is published, other users in the channel can reply to your question and bring forth a solution.

(And really, who would’ve thought Mr. Clean Magic Eraser would do the trick?)

A good question to ask is why one would use Satisfaction to get response to their product woes instead of using the product’s company’s official customer service channels? Well I guess the fact that the responses you get are from actual users of the product you have a problem with or at least people who have prior experience with them earns it plus points. These responses eliminate any sort of bias one might come to expect from any company’s customer service department and what is usually their sugar-coated empty responses.

Satisfaction is on beta. You can sign up here.

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