Will Twitter solve all your customer service issues? No. But it can help.
Let's face it; a lot of customers will never call in and tell you they're disappointed in their product. Unless they're absolutely furious and want their money back, most customers are too busy to worry about being a bit disappointed. They're more likely to tell their friends the product wasn't that great.
And that's the point: as Cluetrain Manifesto pointed out back in 2000, conversations about your product are going on with or without you: markets are conversations. And tools like Twitter and Facebook are just that--tools that consumers use to share their ideas, opinions and complaints about products.
It's what I did. When Sweetwater called a few weeks ago to ask how I liked the Zoom H2 I'd purchased six months before, I let them know honestly that I wasn't all that happy with it. The Zoom tends to pick up a lot of background noise, and when I plug in my Giant Squid dual lapel mics, the Zoom wasn't getting any feed from them. And finally, when I plug the Zoom into my MacBook via USB, every few minutes, the signal would record deafening distortion, both in my headset and on the recording.
The representative was great--he transferred me to a tech person to solve the second issue (the mics need a trickle of power, so under Menu, choose "Plug-In" and set "Plug-In Power" to on) and gave me a link to download a patch for the latest Mac OS to try to fix the third issue. (From what I can gather, the Zoom H2 just picks up an extraordinary amount of background noise, so that issue remains unadressed).
However, the patch didn't work, so I emailed Todd, the tech support representative, to let him know, along with a test recording showing the distortion. Apparently, the Zoom folks didn't respond to him, and a few weeks passed. The next time I tried to use the Zoom and it didn't work well, I Twittered the experience.
Zoom (@zoomfx) jumped right in:
And Sweetwater (@sweetwatersound) did, too, leading to another phone call and Zoom and Sweetwater working together to deal with the issue:
In the end, I got a call from Sweetwater. It seems the distortion issue baffled both them and Zoom, so Zoom agreed to send me a new unit, and I'll send the old one back. This led to this Tweet from me:
And the positive conversation continued on Twitter as well, with others sounding in:
Could this service have happened without Twitter? Possibly. But it didn't. When email and phone calls fail, I, along with many other users, turn to Twitter to express my views on a product. Using new social media tools like Twitter won't replace your existing customer service. And if your customer service is bad to begin with, using Twitter most likely won't improve it (or at least, not much).
However, engaging customers and users in the social media space can help with the ones who might otherwise slip through the cracks. Zoom and Sweetwater followed up via Twitter when traditional modes of communication failed. They joined the conversation where it was taking place: on Twitter. And because of that, an issue that otherwise would have gone unresolved got adressed in a positive way. And a product that would have gone unrecommended now has a bit more positive press.
If you don't have time to be on Twitter constantly, here's a tip: set up Twitter searches for your company and product names so that you can be alerted to mentions of your products as they occur.
Other advice you'd give to companies considering using Twitter for customer service?
