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Comment by jorts | Hacker News Reader

Tweets are a terrible communication channel for solving customer service related issues. I run a customer support team, and almost all of our customer service related tweets end up with us either emailing the customer directly (if we can identify them) or asking them to email us so that we can get more information about their issue/concern. Text at least gives you a private chat where you can give information that you wouldn't publicly post on twitter. It helps drive to a much quicker resolution and overall provides a much better customer experience. If I were in their shoes I would 100% be pushing for this so that I can do my job better. It will definitely reduce the noise on twitter, but I don't think that's the main motivator here, just a nice side effect.

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No way, tweets are great. It's the only way I've been able to connect to airlines immediately (once after waiting on hold for 4+ hours). Most quickly jump to private DMs. No more phonetic spelling my confirmation number over a bad phone connection. Problems get taken care of really quickly, but even it they aren't, I'm able to do other stuff while I wait, unlike waiting on hold, which really saps attention (constantly hearing ads that start with "Hello, I'm your customer service representative. Ad text here.").

This could also work for texts, if they were answered in a reasonable amount of time. As you say, being stuck on a voice-only communications channel that demands 100% of your attention is really expensive, and it's bad for accurately conveying information.

Edit: highly relevant and insightful http://www.harrowell.org.uk/blog/2012/01/21/the-politics-of-... http://www.harrowell.org.uk/blog/2012/01/21/the-politics-of-...

The important thing for getting bureaucracies to do what you want is to make it expensive for the bureaucrat to not deal deal with your problem. That's a distinct advantage to calling in - you're using one of their employees time, and you will continue to do so until you're satisfied. The line agent wants to handle you ASAP for their statistics, and if you get escalated then even better.

Tweets are just an extension of this. It's immediate negative public PR, and there's people whose job it is to manage it. You get an outsized amount of leverage in the "how will my issues get solved" negotiation.

It is also my experience. I think companies react very quickly to tweets in the fear a tweet becomes viral.

Delta in particular. Whoever runs their twitter team gets it. They've always responded fairly quickly to dms and mentions.

>tweets are great. It's the only way I've been able to connect to airlines immediately (once after waiting on hold for 4+ hours)

That is true, but has less to do with the platform and more to do with how few people are on it, compared to how many dedicated social media person(s) there are responding.

In other words, so few people know how to send a tweet (vs send an email or make a phone call) that you are competing for more attention with less other customers. If your grandma suddenly became more comfortable sending a tweet than making a phone call, that would change.

Also, the social media person is incentivised to create good PR (or avoid bad PR), not to follow a set of prescriptive rules about how customer service enquiries are handled and escalate to a more senior decision maker only when strictly necessary

(Corollary: they might have less ability to actually solve routine problems because they don't know the relevant protocols. But they'll make you feel important when trying)

That doesn't add up. I'm sure these companies scale customer service staff to demand. Seems more plausible that Twitter's public nature means complaints there are measurably more harmful, so the companies intentionally devote more resources per complaint.

> I'm sure these companies scale customer service staff to demand

If they did, 45 minute hold times wouldn't be a thing.

I'm pretty sure this only happens because the social media teams are new and over resourced compared to the traditional channels.

so did i understand correctly: you were put on hold and while on hold, you were fed audio adverts, some prefaced with "Hello, I'm your customer service representative" (with the obvious intention to raise your attention, eg, pause your main task, take the phone off speaker and hold to your ear)?

I had never heard of this until now. A new low. these guys are really focused on making sure those 14 minutes on hold actually feels like 14 whole painful minutes of waiting.

the reason you are calling CS to begin with is almost certainly because of some mistake they made; every minute you are on hold compounds that mistake, now this.

Same experience. Using official channels, my request go unanswered. Twitter, the best customer service! Once CEO of a major retail company followed up with me to make sure my issue was handled properly.

The only reason to go public with a complaint on Twitter is lack of faith in the dispute resolution process - which is usually justified.

I once had an insurance company reach out to me after I posted about them on Livejournal. They connected me to someone with the ability to fix problems! Must have found me through search as well.

I once had a problem with my old bank (Citi, IIRC) and tweeted them. They connected me to a CSR 'on steroids' who solved my problem lickety split (I gave him my number, he called immediately, I told him the issue, hung up and he called back within 5 minutes to say 'problem solved').

I was amazed that such people w/in big corps exist. Be nice if that were the rule and not the exception.

Those people always exist, but they cost a lot more than level 1 people. It's just impossible to scale that level of support to 100% of the customer base without escalation etc.

Tweets makes your problem public. Multiple times I couldn't get reach to customer service or I would be lost in a Labyrinth of various agents who would simply transfer me over and over.

Yea, if the company has a terrible support process outside of tweeting, it becomes the nuclear option to get someone to actually deal with you, which is just terrible for everyone.

How is that terrible for the person tweeting? Usually, it works out pretty well for them.

It works but I hate to bring up my issue publicly. So for me to Tweet an issue, it has to be pretty bad. Otherwise, I use official channel or just let it go.

That sounds like it's working exactly as it should. If everyone tweeted every little problem, each tweet would quickly be lost in the noise.

> It helps drive to a much quicker resolution and overall provides a much better customer experience.

Are there measurements behind this claim? It could be that you are optimizing for customer support experience rather than customer experience.

I mean, with the resources, a Twitter interaction could look like

Customer: your service sucks.

Support: I'm sorry to hear you have that experience. Is there anything we can do to make up for it?

Customer: don't send me a bill for next month and I'll stay as your customer.

Support: Sure thing. Hope you can enjoy the service more in the future.

This type of exchange is bad for the company only in that it does not provide any valuable feedback, but as long as you have other ways of getting that, I bet you the customer will feel content.

Thats the fault of the company for not taking advantage an opportunity for improvement. I fail to see how that should be attributed to the medium.

I mean sure, the company could add a second tweet at the end of the interaction:

Support: if you would like us to improve our service for your needs, you are free to send constructive feedback to feedback@example.com.

The reason most companies want the feedback first is because after the customer has received compensation there is little incentive to help the company out. It's viewed as a transaction of feedback for compensation.

But asking the user to be detailed over Twitter is probably futile, given the character limit.

Yea, I was in San Diego airport checking into my flight to London with BA and someone at BA had messed up bad (I'd missed a connection inbound due to their fault).

The check in staff was completely useless, kept sending me to AA people to solve it even though it was BA metal and ticketing. AA sent me back, and again and again. Called support, outsourced and completely useless. Flight was getting closer and closer. Tweeted about it and that team actually solved my problem within 15 minutes being polite and on the ball.

Public shaming is the only way to get any customer service at all for many shitty companies.

I wonder whether it would work with Google.

Mixed results.

Some change. Little or no acknowledgement.

Thouggh I think most of us have no idea of commss and support at Google scale: 3 billion plus profile registrations -- this is Android, Gmail, Youtube, etc.

On the other hand, isn't customer service the one big opportunity remaining to Twitter? They could bring back the text message system for paying businesses. Revamp Tweetdeck into a tool more focused on reputation management etc. They don't need to chase the celebs and fandoms away but they are gradually leaving anyway. Journos will likely stay, the ticks make them feel big.

This already exists.

I recently told a SaaS startup that their password change page was down -- this was communicated via Twitter with an exact error code and everything. After a few hours, they resolved the problem without needing any further details from me. Obviously YMMV, but some issues are appropriate to call out over Twitter.

In my experience it's the absolute best way to get shitty companies to offer passable customer service. They seemingly put better people on the social team than the general call center. Usually it's a single tweet and then a reply asking to hop into DM.

Tweets are great, because they're public and therefore often actually get a response (I guess because companies don't want to be seen as ignoring support messages?). When I email a company, especially if it's a large company, more often than not my message seems to get ignored.

Uh, you are aware Twitter allows "direct" (i.e. private) messaging?

why can't you use DM?

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