Hacker News Reader

Comment by nathancahill | Hacker News Reader

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.").

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com