Recently, Matt Dickman wrote about how Twitter is the 'ultimate customer service tool'. I'm a fan of Matt's blog, and understand what he is saying, however I must disagree with him. As someone who's run customer service focused businesses (I've been in retail) I know that when customers have a problem, they want to speak to a real person, as easily and quickly as possible, either immediately by phone or via a quick response by direct email. They don't want to have to fill in forms online, they don't want to have to read a FAQ first, and they don't want to have to learn something new just to ask a question.
Matt argues that for advanced customer service companies, Twitter is excellent as it always fast and community based dialogue. However, for any company of scale customer service is a serious issue, possibly with a continuous stream of calls, emails, letters etc. These have to be dealt with in a methodical way in order to ensure that every query is dealt with promptly and correctly, by the right person. In my opinion Twitter cannot deliver as a customer service tool because:
1. Most customers would have to learn how to use it first
2. It would require them to sign up to something new just to ask a question
3. They would see their query being lost in a huge flow of others
4. It's very difficult to methodically track individual queries and responses
5. As a company scales the amount of queries could be way beyond what's feasible on a single twitter stream
6. The platform is outside of your control and could go down leaving a major customer services issue.
However, in Matt's most recent post he discusses the importance of listening to the conversation, and shares some great tools to enable this on Twitter. I am completely in agreement with him on this - Twitter is probably the best discursive tool out there, allowing for multiple 1-1 and 1-many conversations at a very high level, and a brilliant community tool. If you're looking to get into the conversation, and become part of it, then Twitter is unparalleled, especially in the social media field.
Of course, there may be a possible future enterprise incarnation of Twitter enabled for customer service, giving multiple channels and multiple authors, and allowing users to post questions without registering, possibly with companies hosting the service themselves. This could be an interesting way of monetising the application, and could very well prove Matt right.
Matt argues that for advanced customer service companies, Twitter is excellent as it always fast and community based dialogue. However, for any company of scale customer service is a serious issue, possibly with a continuous stream of calls, emails, letters etc. These have to be dealt with in a methodical way in order to ensure that every query is dealt with promptly and correctly, by the right person. In my opinion Twitter cannot deliver as a customer service tool because:
1. Most customers would have to learn how to use it first
2. It would require them to sign up to something new just to ask a question
3. They would see their query being lost in a huge flow of others
4. It's very difficult to methodically track individual queries and responses
5. As a company scales the amount of queries could be way beyond what's feasible on a single twitter stream
6. The platform is outside of your control and could go down leaving a major customer services issue.
However, in Matt's most recent post he discusses the importance of listening to the conversation, and shares some great tools to enable this on Twitter. I am completely in agreement with him on this - Twitter is probably the best discursive tool out there, allowing for multiple 1-1 and 1-many conversations at a very high level, and a brilliant community tool. If you're looking to get into the conversation, and become part of it, then Twitter is unparalleled, especially in the social media field.
Of course, there may be a possible future enterprise incarnation of Twitter enabled for customer service, giving multiple channels and multiple authors, and allowing users to post questions without registering, possibly with companies hosting the service themselves. This could be an interesting way of monetising the application, and could very well prove Matt right.
4 comments:
Joshua -- I really appreciate this post. I will be sure to link over to you so others can read and join in. I think the points you raise are valid and should be considered. I am going to write my post tonight on the points you raise and I would love for your input.
Thanks again!
i see a great potential in twitter for customer feedback. that doesn't mean all other channels will be switched of all of a sudden.
i like to give a quick feedback or maybe some stuff i miss abut a software for example. just low key suggestions for which i can't be bothered to pick u the phone and call them.
see it as an additional channel for people who are already on twitter.
I think customer service could only be given to existing Twitter [or insert social media website here] users, exactly right.
While I see the utility for customer service existing users, there is one major drawback that was left out of this post. Customer service is not improved when you choose an unreliable delivery agent - Twitter is highly unreliable.
Many people do not receive posts, DMs, updates to the mobile phone, etc, at all, making your customer service efforts null if this happens. Were Twitter more stable... well, let's reopen the discussion at that time point, because as Twitter Support has recently shown, that might be a long, long time.
I think Twitter could make a good customer service option, but the important part is there are options. I'm the type of person who likes to figure things out for myself, and avoid contacting someone directly if I can. Plus I'm already a twitter-aholic, so it would be a great option for me.
Post a Comment