Customer Service Via Twitter

Posted by Jenn Lowther

Twitter is an immensely useful tool for both personal and professional communication and interaction. Its been fascinating watching the growth of twitter over the past year and seeing the many ways that both people and businesses have begun utilize it. One of the best ways that twitter has been adopted – from a business point of view – is as a tool for customer service.

Twitter, by its very nature, is a digital soap box for people to talk about what’s important to them at any moment of the day. It’s the ideal platform to use when you are happy or upset with a company to voice your pleasure or vent your frustration. Thanks to swift organic growth and the underlying transparency and simplicity of the system, Twitter has become an ideal tool to use for customer service.

Twitter allows you to track what your customers are saying about your brand in real time – no other medium gives you such immediate and unfiltered response from people who are using your product or service. This represents a perfect opportunity for companies to interject into these conversations and either cement the positive brand experience or to rectify any issues that were encountered.

When we launched HootSuite, we actively used twitter as one of our main avenues to hear what our users were saying and how they were using HootSuite. By using twitter, we were able to follow what people were saying about our service, deal with any issues that cropped up surrounding our launch, update people as to the status of new features, and actively engage in conversations with people that were interested in our product. This allowed us to get a real time feel of how our users were using HootSuite and what features they wanted to see implemented. We took this information and included it into our development process, allowing us to give our users a product that they really wanted to use. We’re not alone in using twitter for this purpose, the following are companies currently using twitter for customer service:

To augment the above list of large companies that use twitter for customer service, we put a quick call out on twitter to see who else is using twitter and the following companies/organizations responded:

Your Sole (Orthopedic Insoles)

Paper Check (Essay Editing and Proofreading Services)

Richland College

Perkler (Online Community for Loyalty and Rewards)

Zhiing (Social Navigation Application for Smartphones)

Author: HootSuite

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Articles on the HootSource blog written by "HootSuite" include guest posts, and items written in collaboration with several authors.

Comments

nick December 10, 2008 at 5:06 pm

The large companies you mention should use a crowd custom service site called getsatisfaction.com. We were so impressed with getsatisfaction that we created a small/local business version of their site called feedbackjar.com