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Holtz Communications + Technology

Shel Holtz
Communicating at the Intersection of Business and Technology
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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 response from the company.

This can work in favor of both the company and the customer. Nobody sits on hold while waiting for a rep to research an issue or elevate the situation to a higher tier of support. But today, I saw the first instance of another dimension of the asynchronous nature of Twitter customer support:

Shel Holtz

In this instance, customer support involved two entirely separate companies. Coral, a Best Buy representative, found a tweet from a customer having a problem with a Dell computer purchased at Best Buy. Rather than direct a caller to Dell’s customer service, Coral simply tweeted Lionel Menchaca at Dell to see if he could help.

Reaading through the tweets associated with this, I’m not sure Trygve Olsen—the customer—has been satisfied with the resolution (he still seems unhappy with Dell), but this one tweet opens a lot of possibilities for Twitter’s utility as a customer service channel. Through the interconnected nature of Twitter and the fact that it’s not real-time (even if it’s really, really close), customer support intereactions could happen more seamlessly between customers and representatives of different departments ordifferent companies.

Have you seen something like this before?

09/08/10 | 5 Comments | Twitter, asynchronous communication, and customer service

Comments

  • 1.Coral is awesome-- she did her best to help me with a purchase issue. In my case, I went to the manufacturer directly and got it solved there, but it's great to see that folks like Carol are thinking of this on their own- (in her case, I'm not surprised)

    Doug Haslam | September 2010 | US

  • 2.This Coral lady at Best Buy seems like she?s onto something here. I just read a rant by Conversation Agent about the terrible customer service offered by a railroad company that has been using Twitter to push information but not receive comments or criticisms from its customers ? who were left on the tracks after the train broke down heading to New York. I haven?t come across any company approaching Twitter as a customer service channel the way Coral is using it, but I really hope to see more companies doing this soon. After all, if just one employee can manage Best Buys Twitter account, it would definitely be worth it for other companies to invest in customer engagement, and satisfaction.

    Alexandra Reid | September 2010 | Ottawa

  • 3.I've actually had this same experience with Coral at Best Buy. I was looking for help with a GPS system that was purchased at Best Buy, and while the info I was looking for wasn't going to come from Best Buy, Coral got me what I needed and told me where I needed to go. It was a big help, instead of just saying, oh, sorry I can't help you. This is a bigger trend that we realize, I heard a recent story about the folks at Zappos who looked up pizza delivery places after getting a call at an odd hour in the morning. I think there will be a growing trend of this kind of customer service.

    Maranda Gibson | September 2010 | Fort Worth, TX

  • 4.This is a trend that I will see increase, especially for companies who are increasingly using social media. Those who leverage social media more as a distribution channel risk alienating customers (both B2B and B2C) who are increasingly seeking a dialogue.

    The challenge for organizations is setting expectations upfront and how quickly/often to respond to customer service issues via all their channels. right?

    Cece Salomon-Lee | September 2010 | San Francisco

  • 5.Twitter does open the doors for companies to provide the next level of customer service, but it has to be done correctly. I recently made a purchase from an electronic's company who sent me an email stating my order had shipped and gave me the shipping date. After days of the tracking info not updating, when it did update, I realized that the package had really shipped a week later even though their email was very specific regarding the shipping date. I turned to Twitter after not receiving a response from them by email and they didn't respond by Twitter either. Now they have two strikes against them in my opinion. If companies are going to use Twitter for customer service, then they need to have someone dedicated to maintaining it.

    Vee Sweeney | September 2010

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