Twitter, asynchronous communication, and customer service

Customer service via Twitter is the subject of considerable discussion both pro and con. A lot of the negative commentary suggests that people are taking to Twitter, in full public view, in order to circumvent the preferred method of customer contact: the telephone.

Among the various answers to this challenge is one that doesn’t get a lot of attention. Customer service on Twitter occurs in something close to real time, but in truth, it’s asynchronous. It could be a few seconds, a couple minutes, several hours or even days before a company’s customer service department sees a tweet; the customer can take just as long to act on a… Read More »

What we can learn from the Old Spice response campaign without being copycats

Copycats were expected in the wake of the Old Spice response campaign, in which the Old Spice Man responded to tweets with brief YouTube videos. After all, despite a few party poopers who didn’t like the campaign and a few misguided claims that the campaign didn’t produce results, ad agency Weiden & Kennedy has shown that the campaign, including the Twitter-YouTube effort, has paid off in a big way:

We weren’t disappointed. Daniel Frelich has produced a television commercial that parodies the Old Spice Man in his campaign to unseat Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy in the upcoming primary election. Cisco Systems took a crack at the… Read More »

Are we becoming a nation of whiners or adapting to a new channel for obtaining customer service?

Long before Twitter, business consultants advised to embrace customer complaints. Wise people like Don Peppers and Martha Rogers saw complaints for what they were: opportunities to identify problems companies can fix, leading to happier customers, better word of mouth and more sales.

In their 1993 book, “The One-to-One Future,” Peppers and Rogers write that “just by complaining, a customer is initiating a dialogue with a marketer and making himself open to one-to-one collaboration. The complaining customer is an asset—a business opportunity—for any marketer following a share-of-customer strategy.”

No organization is perfect. Nor are… Read More »

Is customer support outreach scalable?

Sarah Wurrey, Bill Sledzik, and Jennifer Zingsheim questioned the longtime viability of customer support outreach on the latest episode of the Media Bullseye Radio Roundtable. I’ve read many of these issues before on various blogs, but I don’t think they’ll keep companies from continuing to adopt this approach.

Adobe has engaged in customer outreach for years, trolling message boards in the days before social media looking for opportunities to solve problems with their products about which customers were writing. Dell, as part of its reinvigorated customer focus, inaugurated a team doing pretty much the same thing. But it’s Comcast’s… Read More »

Comcast brings customer service to Twitter

Scott Monty mentioned in an email to me that Comcast has launched a customer service initiative on Twitter. Dubbed “Comcast Cares,” it seems that the effort is aimed at finding people who are tweeting their complaints about Comcast and offering to help. Whoever is leading the effort then engages in conversations with those to whom she or he is reaching out.

Reviewing the 21 pages of tweets from Comcast going back to April 6 reveals a long list of replies to individuals:

As with any company, the words need to be backed up with action, but if Comcast has taken a page from the Dell playbook, this could be an outstanding example of… Read More »

Starbucks adopts IdeaStorm concept

The Dell IdeaStorm was a revolutionary concept in customer relations. The idea was simple: Take the concept of Digg, tweak it a bit here and there, and unleash it so customers and employees can submit ideas. Anyone can then comment on any idea and vote to either promote or demote it. Those that rose to the top are then moved into action. To date, nearly 9,000 ideas have been submitted, attracting almost 69,000 comments. The ideas have been promoted almost 614,000 times. Some of the current top-promoted ideas include offering computers with no extra software and standardizing power cables for all laptops.

The IdeaStorm concept is so… Read More »

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