Thanks for the comment. However, I have never said not to listening via Twitter. I said that it can be an useful tool and it has its purpose in life. It is a monitoring tool, it can be used very effectively and there are tools that can help you do that very well (Neighborhood America, Radian6).

It definitely has a place in the organization – just not for doing customer service. It is almost impossible to solve a problem at 140 chars in any timely manner.

It is definitely a tool to be used by the organization. As I said in my title and post, don’t use Twitter for customer service unless you have a strategy and purpose, and can do it well.

I think you have just posted one of the models of how to do that well.

Actually,

My point is to say “don’t engage in customer service, engage for other purposes”.

I don’t believe that customer service can be delivered 140 chars at the time. Nor do I believe they (the people adopting Twitter for it) are trying. I think it is becoming an escalation tool for pushing problems to other channels (email, phone, etc.) and that is simply fine.

Monitoring any channel for potential problems and feedback is absolutely necessary. And it does raise the profile of the company. However, it is not customer service – it is branding. And it is good.

I am concerned, and I said that before, that when the novelty wear off customers will raise or have high expectations that are not possible to deliver against.

Solving a problem 140 characters at the time is not possible, as most problem statement, clarification questions, solutions, answers, etc. are already longer than that.

I just want to raise the flag and say “be careful of what you promise, you will have to deliver”. Most vendors and organizations are rushing without an idea or strategy and that is foolish. We have detailed knowledge of what happens when they do that. And, as I said in the post,if you rush you will fail.

Thanks for the discussion.

You are correct – any channel can be used as long as expectations are set. Sometimes the expectation should be “we don’t support that channel for these type of transactions”.

Alas, you want to make sure the channel has something to offer. There is a significant difference between saying “monitoring the Twitterverse for branding and potential problems to solve, then referring them to the call center”" and saying “we are doing customer service via Twitter”.

I know that they are all doing escalation assistance and monitoring for branding. Ant that is great, linking branding to customer service had to be done and this is the easiest way to do it.

But they would be more honest if they said that, instead of pretending they can solve a problem in 140 chars – no matter how many back and forth there are.

I don’t have the numbers, but am trying to get them, to indicate what number of complete solutions any CS provider has done over Twitter.

I definitely welcome engaging customers over any channel – even ESP as tom Siebel once hinted. Byut I don’t want to lower the recognized value of Customer Service byu calling it something that is not. Once the novelty wears off, and it will, the expectation will remain high and the providers will fail to deliver.

And that was my main point.

There’s something that has been bugging me about this statement at the beginning of your post. Of course you’ll fail if you try to use Twitter for Customer Service. I think the larger issue/challenge for engaging with customers is being able to interact on their channel of choice – or being where they want to be. While twitter is still a fairly small, insular community, a lot of consumers are there. Many don’t want to be engaged on this community, however just as many do. A failure to recognize that will reverberate throughout your organization.

I know your point isn’t to say ‘dont engage’, but I think it’s important to recognize that companies be proactive in how and where they do engage.

(note: In a conversation with Jeremiah Owyang at Twtrcon, he told me that his presumption of the future of twitter being social crm [http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2009/03/22/the-future-of-twitter-social-crm/] might have been a bit off target.)

Good post. I believe you are right as it relates to aligning your customers to the proper channels in order to be able to support them effectively. Twitter has some shortcomings in that regard.

However, as referenced by the Comcast case study, Twitter can be an effective customer service tool if proper expectations are set (like everything).

From what I know, Comcast is using Twitter (enter any other social media here) to monitor the web, blogosphere, twitterverse, etc. to listen to what is being said.

Twitter (and other social media sites) in one sense are proactive research mediums that can be leveraged to engage customers (in this case), prospects, competitors, partners, etc. and then transition the interaction into “traditional” and/or more mature channels to respond appropriately and ultimately deepen the customer relationship

Good insights and thanks again for sharing.

Best regards,

Brian @CRMStrategies
http://freecrmstrategies.wordpress.com

Thanks for the comment. You know me… I will never, ever say that anyone must rush to anything. IT is all about evolution towards the goal – slowly and sure-footed wins the race.

Thanks for the nice comments. I do see some value for Twitter, and you mention some, and even further if you venture into proactive customer service (announcements, etc.). Technology is way cheaper and easier to adopt than SMS, and can potentially replace it easily.

Comcast, if you can look at it, ends up usually DMing customer account numbers and solving issues offline of referring to call centers (from my experiences). Zappos does not seem to be active with specific activities – but presence is strong.

And, maybe that should have been my BL: show a strong presence, but don’t call it customer service and support — yet.

Thanks for reading and commenting.

OK, so let’s the plug for RNOW slide for now.

I always said that SaaS (or OnDemand or Hosted) are great applications to quickly adapt to changes and new demands from customers. Literally overnight, in some ocassions, you can do that – and it works great.

We have RNOW, as well as Toucan for SFDC and GetSocial Twitter (part of SurgarForge) for SugarCRM already moving to serve the Twitter world with offerings. And they all do serve the purpose. The question of integration, who can do more with integrating within the same platform, is open for debate as all three of you have different models for that. I think it is great that customer’s needs are served quickly and efficiently.

However, the issues of deep experience management and integration with enterprise apps still remain for all three. SaaS does have some ability to integrate into enterprise applications – but is complex and not at the level I will need it to go all out. Still, lots of room for people moving into CRM to go with SaaS… and many reasons to do so.

As for CoTweet and all the other tools, I have seen them. We are still doing lots of tools (and KBs) for answering questions. In the end, there is no end-to-end integration though one screen ala one-screen, one-app. Which is my gold standard for corporate applications.

Thanks for the comment, and for the interesting information.

Great point about the inevitable break in seamless experience for anything but the most trivial of interactions. What can you do, really, in 140 chars? And without simple threading, deep search or integration you’re just asking for a big ‘ol mess of a mess!! I can barely keep up with RTs and @ among my own limited circle of Followers, let alone a handful of company reps managing thousands of customer tweets looking for help. #ServiceFail waiting to happen. You can’t even do simple transaction based service: most customers can’t even enter their account # and related account info into 140 chars, to say nothing about privacy/security.

So, in its current form, what role can Twitter really play in the Customer Experience? Is it really more one-way? Broadcast messages(eg service is up/down), announcements(eg New patch ready, new training doc available for download), press releases, tips and howtos, etc. Just how meaningfully interactive(ie versus just chit chat) can Twitter in current form be?

Is it more intangible? The fact that “we’re here!”…that “we’re hip!”? That we at least are showing up to play?

I need to take a closer look at what exactly Zappos, Comcast, and other examples of “success” are doing.

Thanks!
Russ
Seattle, WA
http://www.twitter.com/russhatfield

On the second point, since we have knowledge at the core of our entire product suite, we provide agents with the right knowledge, at the point of interaction, to standardize twitter interactions. You are correct in that an entire, deep customer experience cannot be handled on twitter…yet. There are companies, like Cotweet, that are addressing the lack of ‘threaded tweeting’. In recent comments from twitter product mgmt, it seems they may be evolving a capability similar to FriendFeed’s threaded conversations. That will help in expanding the experience on twitter.