Corvus Consulting

I’m still unsure if the right moniker is Get Satisfaction or Satisfaction, but either way the service found at http://getsatisfaction.com rocks. Their entire reason for being, built right into the brand, is to create positive outcomes between companies and customers.

Recently, the team at Satisfaction (I’ll use both names) added a new feature that expertly pivots outputs into positive outcomes, one so good that it needs to be mentioned here.

The team had clearly noticed that another service, Twitter, tends to be a place where people are apt to vent frustrations. It’s a hip thing right now to label something that goes wrong with FAIL, and if we for that word, we’ll find that, yes, people blow off some steam on Twitter. Tracking the name of a company or product will produce a list of statements about that brand, both good and bad.

It’s understandable that venting happens on Twitter, with its focus on immediacy and punchy statements. But, short of getting a Twitter account and spending time watching for and getting into direct conversations with people when they’ve aired a complaint, what’s a company to do? That’s why Get Satisfaction is thinking ahead for us. Enter, Overheard.

From the Get Satisfaction page for this new feature:

Hear what your customers are saying, and respond to them in a channel they are already using. Simply set the keywords you want to track, and you’ll see all the messages on Twitter (“tweets”) that match your search terms. See someone you want to reach out to or a customer idea worth exploring? Turn that tweet into a topic and quickly bring the rest of the Get Satisfaction network into the conversation.

And from an interior page, a bit more on the mechanics of how this works:

Anyone, employee or customer, can convert a tweet into a Get Satisfaction discussion and take advantage of all the rich topic tools here. Overheard even notifies the original Twitter poster of the discussion that was started in response to their tweet issue.

The output of a frustrated post on Twitter is pivoted into a the direction of a positive outcome, without trying to wrestle that frustrated person into a new signup at Satisfaction. Moreover, the representative responses become part of the stream of Twitter posts about the company or service they work for, balancing out the complaints with the responses. It feels like the idea of embedded widgets taken to the next level, incorporating the outputs of an entirely different service and building interweaving those outputs into the experience.

Bravo to Get Satisfaction, or Satisfaction, or whatever they’d like to be called. However you label it, Overheard is a great win for Outcomes.