Less than a fifth of companies have embraced Twitter for customer service | Hacker News Reader

Less than a fifth of companies have embraced Twitter for customer service

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4 pointskevinxray11 comments

It's a tough call on Twitter customer support: There's been some great success stories and campaigns (see:DELL), but you can't really do much more than help funnel people through your existing channels: "Sorry about your problem, e-mail support at xxx," and everytime you do that publicly, you're pointing those who do follow you to things going wrong. It takes a special skill and dedicated employee to do right, which may or may not result in a net payoff.

The thing that bothers me more about Twitter support is how all the sudden companies are expected to using one private protocol as an "official" channel, when it's a protocol they don't own nor control. Nobody blames their local grocery for not using AT&T instead of Verizon for their support calls, but all the sudden you're not on Twitter, Facebook, and GetSatisfaction (all private companies), and "you don't listen to your customers," even if you have a bevy of other avenues.

Does this bug anyone else?

We have a twitter account for announcements. I find it quite inconvenient and inappropriate when people send questions or messages through Twitter that could be better handled through email. It's essentially a waste of time as the twitter format is so limiting.... it's not possible to say anything detailed or truly informative in those tiny messages.

That said, it is worth engaging customers and providing info on Twitter. I wouldn't really call what it works well for 'customer service', however.

If 15-20% of top companies are using twitter for customer service, that is a tremendously good thing.

To frame it another way, if you told a startup that 15% of top companies would be using their startup for customer service within a few years of launching, most people would take that in a heartbeat.

Also, this early I don't think the actual number is as important as how fast its growing/shrinking. It'd be useful if they showed us last year's number and I'll be curious to see next's...

A tremendously good thing... for Twitter. Whether it's any good for the companies or their customers is an entirely different matter.

20 per cent of ‘tweets’ contain a reference to a product or brand

What % of those were auto-retweets, tweet bots, or were originated by the brand owner? "Real" tweeters seem much less inclined to do this brand-whoring than this 20% figure implies.

I don't think you can say much more than "it's broke" in 140 characters.

You can fit in some curses.

Less than a fifth of companies have inserted a square peg in a round hole. Actually, that is probably not quite accurate.

Anyway, if you read past 140 characters, neither is the headline. At the end companies are singled out who have "a Twitter" but only use it as a unidirectional medium (if at all) rather than responding to customers' communications. It should be fairly self-evident that Twitter is not a medium for actual customer service beyond the very cursory.

Having some past experience doing technical support I don't really understand why people would try to make Twitter a customer service tool. It's really just the wrong tool for the job. Very few problems can be solved in 140 characters short of "call this number, e-mail this address, IM this person" which is just re-direction. Something like Google Wave would probably make more sense from a support standpoint.

Communication with a CS representative requires a dialog. It has to be interactive and dynamic. That is not Twitter. Twitter is not chat. Chat is a back and forth exchange where people speak WITH each other. Twitter is directed speech where people speak AT each other.

Using twitter for customer service is like using a scooter to tow a boat. You could probably do it, but that doesn't mean it makes sense.

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