Everybody Is All A-Twitter: Twitter as a Customer Service and Support Channel
Posted by Hoyt Mann on Wed, Aug 12, 2009 @ 09:24 PM
Everywhere you look there is someone touting the need or advantages of using Twitter as a customer service channel. And that is OK if all your other customer service channels have been optimized and you have the staff to handle the social media demands.
But I have a couple of concerns. My background includes a stint as a customer support tech in a company where all documentation (which included phone conversations) needed to meet pretty stringent regulations. Sometimes it did get a little ridiculous; more than once we were told not to use a certain term. We called the substitutions weasel words. But enough of that...
What I wonder is if there is any way the use of social media, like Twitter, as a customer support channel could be integrated into such a highly regulated business. One of the benefits PhaseWare offers is a complete history of every contact with a customer plus all the tools to help them only a click away. Without a way to securely integrate Twitter, how much work will it be to support your customer with Twitter as well as your own system?
Since Twitter lacks the integration for capturing all the information about a certain customer's issue, how does that get entered into the system? How much information could even be gleaned from Twitter with the 140 word limit? I guess you could cut and paste, toggle back and forth, but that is a time consuming endeavor and, these days, we are trying to do more with less.
Another concern is that it is extremely hard, if not impossible, to verify that you are actually interacting with a real customer and not someone posing as one. Could incorrect data be added to a customer record? How much trouble will it cause?
How many cycles of tweeting and responding would be needed for an issue to be resolved? How hard to get that entire effort into a customer record?
I don't think Twitter could be used successfully as a complete channel for customer support due to these shortcomings, particularly for B2B (business to business). It would be better to monitor Twitter for mentions of your product, company, and/or industry. If someone is complaining on Twitter about one of your products, create an alert on an application like Tweetbeep so you can find out about it quickly, and send a short note to that person, either as a @TwitterID or as a direct message. Then you can get the conversation started on a channel where all data capture is simple, complete, and verifiable.
No doubt an application to plug Twitter into a customer support solution will be created. Even then it may not be worth it because of security issues or other problems. At this point, the use of Twitter as a full customer service channel is very limited. As social media matures, it will likely begin to be treated as email is treated now. But until that time, Twitter only gives you part of the information you need and very little room to convey the information the customer needs.
Thank you for reading our blog. Leave comments and don't forget to use the social bookmarking widgets to spread the news!