Twitter Service Assurance… Please!

Twitter is – as anyone with a pulse now knows – absolutely everywhere. From Terry Wogan to geek conferences, from trashy celeb magazines to ultra cool fashonistas, it seems you can’t go for long in a morning without hearing or seeing your first unsolicited Twitter reference of the day.

And of course businesses, both big and small, are gettig well in on the act too. Why wouldn’t they! I mean, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out the potential value of Twitter to firms. Whether it’s used for passive monitoring of brand mentions, proactive PR, or as a sales or service tool, there’s a ton of potential just waiting to be tapped I to. Where I work we’re about 3 months into our Twitter journey. At present we’re primarily using Twitter to proactively search out and reach out to any of our customers showing signs of distress, either tweeting in general that they’re having problems, or (alarmingly worryingly) tweeting to their followers about their frustration about trying to interact with us via a traditional service channel.

Interestingly – and very positively – we quite quicky have seen news of our presence on Twitter spread virally, and now regularly we get people tweeting us as their primary contact channel without ever trying phone or email. So in no time at all we find ourselves with a completely new service channel, and what’s more, it’s one via which we conduct pretty much everything (excepting personal details etc) in public for all to see, we communicate using the same language that our customers choose to (no corporate speak!), and we try to be as ‘converged’ as we can. By that I mean that we are trying to offer a simple service where we can help our customers out whatever their query may be about. So no press 1 for billing, press 2 for technical, contact this department for x and that one for y. Nope, none of that, it’s all in one place. We’ve built a team to make sure we can help with as much as we can without having to refer to elsewhere internally to sort something. It’s not perfect yet, but it’s getting there.

All of this is great and of course whilst it’s early days for us, and we’re very much still learning, we’re already starting to get some amazingly positive feedback from our customers. And when they tweet their praise for us, all their followers also get to hear about us – bringing the holy grail of customer advocacy tantalisingly close.

But none of this is the reason for this blog. A week or so ago Twitter had a little wobble, and with no warning at all we (and countless other Twitter users) found ourselves with our account suspended. Cue panic! Had we done something wrong? Contravened some rule we weren’t aware of? Nope. Had we exceeded some kind of limit? No. Well lets not worry, we’ll tweet Twitter and I’m sure they’ll have us back online in no time. If only it were so simple. I mean, have you tried getting a reply from them?! As it turned out we needed to pull in favours from a myriad of angles to get our account quickly re-activated, which thanks to our network and their friends in high places, we managed in an hour or two. So actually, in the end, we survived the episode with nothing more than a couple of tweets from customers asking what was up. But this rammed home to us just how exposed we felt when we had the problems that night. It’s not like we’d ever dream of building our contact centre infrastructure on a platform that we had no formal support for, no service availability agreements in place for and so on, so this has brought us into a very different kind of place. As everyone knows, Twitter are yet to declare how they plan on making money from their product. But I can guarantee you that there must be a stack of companies of all sizes just desperate to PAY to get some kind of service assurance from Twitter. Maybe Twitter are being extremely astute in watching their product become ever more depended upon by businesses, and at some point in the future they’re gonna pounce on the market with a killer set of propositions tailored to different needs. Or maybe they are just paddling so damned hard to even just keep things running that actually working out what the market is willing to stump up to have the confidence that their new found channel isn’t gonna collapse and die with no warning is low on their agenda.

I suspect that their actual position is a mixture of these. Maybe their little wobble was actually planned, intended to gauge just how dependent on them we had all become. I doubt that, but whatever, I expect to see some commercial propositions from them hitting the market soon. How Twitter will price them remains to be seen, but they are very much in the driving seat. One thing’s for certain though, the chapter of using social media as mainstream service channels for businesses is only starting to be written. For us, 3 months of tweeting already feels like an amazingly positive experience, and the reaction internally to what we’re doing is almost exclusively overwhelmingly positive. But I really would love the security blanket that comes with a supported, paid-for, assured service…