Can Twitter be used for effective customer service? Social media is the democratization of the internet, providing outspoken customers with public voices they didn't have before. Now if a customer has a remarkable service experience, whether positive or negative, she can tell more that two friends; she can tell hundreds, thousands or hundreds of thousands in a blog post.
Or, now, a Tweet. Twitter gives customers the chance to voice instant responses to ongoing situations, live and unedited. If you're on hold for minutes on end, it's now easy to document the agonizing process on Twitter instead of summarizing the next day in a blog post. If a repair guy doesn't show up, customers can document the fact instantly and share it with hundreds of followers. Customer service departments, take notice. Some may be cringing at the idea. But others have taken this new media as an opportunity.
Frank Eliason from Comcast Customer Outreach has taken on the daunting task of responding to Comcast customers' Tweets. J. W. Crump did a detailed analysis of the types of Tweets that Frank was responding to. Not surprisingly, nearly 63% of the Tweets with keyword "Comcast" were negative. More interesting to me were the topics of the Tweets as Crump broke them down. He categorized 59.3% of them as comments on "the company," that is to say, general groaning with no specific complaints. And then, there were the categories a customer service rep could actually do something about: the service not working, the service being slow, the prices being too high. These specific complaints are outstanding opportunities for customer outreach.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: most customers don't want anything unreasonable. They simply want their issues addressed by a real person (who doesn't sound bored to death because of being paid $7.75 an hour) without having to wait on hold for more than five minutes. Kudos to Comcast for taking a stab at that. Frank may not be able to cut down on Comcast's hold times, but he is in fact a real person actively reaching out to customers and treating them like human beings. Even if ComcastCares can't solve every problem right away, wouldn't you be more inclined to Twitter Frank, a real person with a name and who doesn't sound like he's going to commit suicide if he takes one more disgruntled customer service call, than that 1-800 number where you know the rep won't be able to help you?
Corporations take note. Consider Twitter outreach if your customer service department is getting less than satisfactory reviews. Consider being human and reaching out instead of sitting quietly in the call center, sipping Mountain Dew and hating your job.