I am actually very curious at this point to see where twitter will go in the future with versions and functions before committing to it full time. We all know it has flaws, but if they are fixed they could be riding the wave for a long time. If not, or not fixed on time, I will be curious to see what happens.

Thanks
Esteban

Twitter is a good place for IVR systems, both for customer service and marketing. I think Wim was accurate when mentioning that, at scale the customer experience will require automation. I don’t agree with Wim that once the automation is in place Twitter as a channel won’t have advantages over other channels. The light-weight experience is my first choice for “most” customer service and as tools are developed to enhance that experience this sentiment will grow. Yes, we build those tools.

Brands won’t have the option of just listening. As Esteban keeps pointing out marketing should be the primary focus for most brands on Twitter. It won’t be well received to market without listening over a channel that is two-way.

Dave

Interesting point. Makes me think (which will continue after this reply is done). I always said that Twitter is best used for ears and mouth (listen to feedback, market your content and value to your community). I never thought of it as an announcement tool overall for — well, everything. There are a couple of recorded events where (Stanley cup playoffs, an outage on a cable TV provider was known via twitter and word spread before other channels were even notified) this has happened, but I cannot recall or know of any time when the organization actually used it in that manner. I know there is some investigation going on as far as using it as a reverse-911 by local governments (instead of calling everyone by phone, one-by-one, use Twitter to reach out to people).

I am somewhat concerned by the real-time nature and lack of ‘importance’ that the channel provides (in other words, you either get it when it is announced, or you miss if). Sure, it can be repeated constantly, but the people who heard it once may disengage and miss the rest of the updates.

In any case, you bring an interesting point and I will think about it… thanks for that!

(and thanks for the read, and RT)

Exactly. It is not about losing focus of the end-results (providing the answer) but rather focus on the means (better channels, better integration) to get there.

I just have one question for you: how do you ensure that all channels deliver the same experience at the end? Do you focus on all channels regardless or the best channel for each transaction? How do you make those decisions and implement those experiences?

That is what I think is missing in Twitter, and that is what I’d love to hear from the people reading / commenting here. How to make it happen?

My POV on Twitter is that today does not have what it needs, and tomorrow it may — or Twitter2.0 may (whatever that product ends up being). It is up to us to point the direction based on our experiences in other channels, other situations, and to blaze the trail on the best way to do this in customer service. I honestly believe that if we do that we can shorten the transit through the trough of dissillusionment (Gartner’s Hype Cycle) and the fasten the slow climb up the slope of enlightment. That is the purpsoe of this conversation, IMHO.

If the people who read / participate in this community are the ones who are going to move Twitter adoption forward (and I do believe we are), then we have to be focused on what we need to do. We know, at least I hope we do, what Twitter is good for and how to do it well (at least for where we are in time with Twitter) and what is missing. That is the best way to move forward: either fill-in what’s missing or avoid the traps and focus on delivering value with what we can today.

Tomorrow is different and someone else will probably bring about the solution… I am just one more cog in the community doing what i can to advance SCRM.

Thanks for stopping by. I appreciate your contribution from the side of CEA — always an interesting perspective.

You bring an excellent point which I had advocated for in the past, but not yet in the Twitter world – cross-channel measurement and analysis. This is, in my opinion, the last frontier for multi-channel. Integrating biz rules or KM across channels is doable, not easy – but doable. So far, measuring channel-hopping customers or transactions that cross channels is not easy to do – actually, make that not done. I got so tired of being asked this question and have no answer while I was at Gartner that I ended up telling my customers to go ask their vendors why they were not giving them (and us) any information on it. It was not a welcome answer, but the only I could give at the time. My customers thought I did not know the answer, but the true is that still today (for the most part) ther eis no answer — or the answer is not what customers want (one vendor that does it all in 2-3 months and works forever without changes).

A key concept in feedback management is that if you don’t do it well, as in following each interaction mostly, by the time you capture the feedback is probably too late to act. How many times a customer said ‘oh, now you care?” when we reach out to them?

But I digress, I can talk about that forever back to Twitter. I cannot wait to see the developments and as I said above: I think that the key to using Twitter is going to be avoiding the problems and errors we made before – and that was the spirit of this blog.

Thanks for bringing a new dimension to the discussion.

A great conversation with many different facets and perspectives. If you don’t mind, I would quite like to bring another angle in and compare Twitter to an outbound voice dialer – this was prompted by the megaphone comment which which amused me and actually prompted me to comment on your blog.

My simple point is that rather than considering Twitter to be like an IVR; which as you correctly point out are generally poorly implemented and not liked by customers. I think you could also consider it to be like an outbound voice dialer providing notifications to your customers.

Now I realise that these things are generally not liked by customers since they are essentially an intrusion or there is nobody there to field the call when they dialer calls you. However, given the broadcast SMS nature of Twitter and the fact it is non-invasive in the way that a dialer just isn’t – Twitter is never going to interrupt the TV for example then there are merits to be had in thinking about it in this way.

The other thing to consider here, is that if you are a company with a Twitter presence then you are opting in to what that company has to say. Therefore, one could argue that you are reaching high value customers simply by virtue of the fact that they must be loyal to your company in brand to follow you in the first place.

Personally, I quite like the 140 character limit, it makes people be more concise which in a world where there is a lot to be said and time is precious is quite welcome.

Cheers
Mark

I agree to an extent. I’m a fan of using Twitter for customer service; I’ve written about it a few times, myself:

But you’re right–Twitter won’t replace your existing IVR or any other type of service. Instead, we need to look to expanding our service options horizontally. Some folks want to call on the phone, so let’s improve the IVR. Some want an instant Twitter response they can rave/complain about after, so let’s monitor social media channels. Some want to meet us at trade shows.

You get the idea. Customer service is about using all available channels to serve and reach out to our customers.

I’ve seen that megaphone video too, it is pretty funny and does point out the absurdities of having those conversations in real life. But I think that metaphor falls down when you realize that the conversations going on within Twitter are being recorded. While there is a lot of noise on Twitter, it is possible to focus your attention on what you want to find. To extend the metaphor above, it is like recording all the sounds of people shouting with megaphones, and then using a sophisticated voice recognition tool to parse out each person’s words and provide ways to search and sort them – all in real time.

But no argument at all that we are still in early days. Twitter itself may or may not evolve into the tool we need. But it’s potential as a connector of disparate groups of people is an important one, and one that later tools will do well to build on. Returning to what I said earlier in this comment, we may not have been able to have this discussion on Twitter, but is was through Twitter that I first found this conversation. In that respect I would agree that Twitter is a great routing tool like an IVR. But unlike IVRs, it’s not about automating company interactions with individuals, its about facilitating the company’s reach through its advocates to achieve the necessary benefits of scale.

Thanks again for bringing up this topic for discussion! It is certainly time we looked past the novelty factor of these tools and find out if and how we can use them to actually improve how we do business. Looking forward to finding out where this leads us next!

As far as Twitter or any other social media channel is concerned, it’s just that – another way to interact with your customers. And if there’s a way to log it and track it properly you can then integrate it into the complete cross-channel view of your customer experience. Was Twitter the last resort? Did this customer try the website first, then the IVR and only then decided to openly voice his frustrations for everyone (including your competition) to see? Are you aware that the way you respond to this tweet might be viewable to everyone?

There obviously a lot to take into account when analyzing this new form of customer interaction. I don’t believe it’s mature enough just yet, but with new developments by several companies (CoTweet had some good news yesterday) it will eventually grow into something that really can’t be ignored.

IVR is a slam dunk. Route people to the right resources, let them self-serve if they want to, let them speak to a live person at any point in the experience, etc. Social media channels are a little tougher to gauge. How do you get notified? Is it reliable enough? And of course, there’s the whole issue of information security.

I’m very excited to see how all this develops. Thanks for the great topic.

Thanks for stopping by.

I see where you are coming from in your comment and I would agree except for two things: Twitter makes for a lousy (IMO) many-many tool. Someone else mentioned Twitter being a megaphone (there is also a fairly funny video showing Twitter in real-life that talks to the same idea). Imagine people with megaphones yelling at each other. Yeah, that is kinda like many-many twitter conversations — we all have megaphones and we are yelling at each other at the same time. In short outbursts. Not the best way to commnicate.

A platform like yours, Lithium, is much more conducive to a many-many communication, has no limitations on space, has memory and storage, and it can probably easy interface with Twitter as a starting point for a conversation. Someone gets on the megaphone to ask a question, and is then invited into a community to have a conversation. This is similar to what we have today with many of the other channels we use for customer service and escalation. I think ultimately the-tool-that-will-replace Twitter will become better at doing that, automatically escalate and route to the best channel based on your needs. Twitter may even be able to grow into that, but it will need some changes and additional tools.

I see a potential for Twitter to become that entry point to a community, but not in its current state. Communities that exist without a memory and storage are too ephemeral to have a long-term value.

Keep coming back as I will continue to expand, my view, and we continue to have conversations on where we go with communities. It is going to be the next next thing for us i reckon.

However, that tends to miss the real value of social services like Twitter: it’s not about providing another way to connect the company and the customer, its about connecting the customer to other customers who can respond on the company’s behalf. Why force the customer to talk to a robot (no matter how well programmed) when you can help them talk to a volunteer expert who can provide more solutions than even the most sophisticated self-help systems, and the emotional satisfaction that a computer program never could. That a company can identify power users and advocates, and facilitate their interactions with the company’s other customers through a channel like Twitter is the real promise social tools have. With a community of volunteers you can achieve economies of scale that previously could only be accomplished through automation, but without any loss in perceived value by the customer – in fact, they often value the help they receive more when it comes from their peers.

However, I don’t think Twitter alone is sufficient to make all that happen – more for your points about the 140 character limits and the lack of depth and memory that you cite in the comments and in your previous article. But it is a mistake to think of the tool in terms of 1 to 1 communications that can only be made efficient through automation. Twitter IS well-suited to connect many people together on almost any topic, and this is where the possibilities lie. Twitter by itself may not be enough for real support, but making Twitter more like an IVR is not going to make it better, it will only make it as limited as IVRs currently are.

That is a great comment. And something that I started to notice happening. Most people who use tools to track twitter were just doing egocentric searches, but lately have been going the other way.

I even read a couple of cases about companies that changed customers from going with a specific vendor in favor of another just by doing twitter well (no, not spamming back, just having the conversation that the original vendor did not have with its customers).

I think that the key here is to level the playing field, to make sure you participate at the same level as your competitors — even more. Then we are back to being able to just be yourself supporting an additional channel.

Great, great comment. Thanks a lot…

Thanks for a great comment. I wonder how long you have been saving that one? Just kidding, I think it is a great comparison, really.

I used to use IRC back in the days when — well, we are not going to go into details of what I did back then, most of it was mostly legal anyways.

The point is that I do remember it quite well and I think it is a great comparison (size restrictions aside) as to how this channel and that one are similar.

I think that the part that is most interesting from what you said is the limited reach. We tend to forget that Twitter is till very early adopter stuff, limited adoption, not even close to critical mass.

However, i think this is is the best time to try to provide direction and input into this market. If we do a good job now and come up with the best practices, the good solutions, the way to do it we can cut the time to adoption and increase the number of people who like it and use it.

That is why I spend time researching and thinking about this…

Thanks for the great reference, and the trip down memory lane.

Thank you Twitter.

Graham Hill
Customer-centric Innovator