Twitter customer service works, and it has a blind spot: the customers who never tweet. If you answer only the people who complain where you can see them, you are listening to the loudest few in the queue.
This year gave us a clean test of that. In April, a cable company started watching Twitter for complaints and answering them by name. By December, the man running it told John Battelle that he was managing seven people, hiring three more, and had followed up with an estimated 10,000 customers since the start of the year. He had about 5,500 followers. That is a real result for a channel most support managers had barely heard of twelve months ago.
What did the Comcast Twitter experiment get right?
It went to where the customer already was. Nobody had to find a phone number, sit through a menu, or fill in a form. A person typed a frustrated sentence into a box, and a real person with a name answered within hours.
Frank Eliason, who holds the title Director of Digital Care, told Battelle that he treats everyone the same, whether they arrive by email, in person or on Twitter. The point is a good one. The channel is new. The job is the oldest one in support: read what the customer wrote, work out what they want, and follow it through.
It also shows how little most companies are asking for. A fast, human reply is enough to change how a customer feels about a company that has just failed them.
Who is left out when support moves to Twitter?
The obvious answer is anyone who is not on Twitter. Techdirt made the sharper version of the point in April, in its piece on Comcast Cares. The author tweeted about a faulty HD service and had three Comcast employees contact him within a few hours. His question was whether that speed was available to ordinary customers, or only to people with an audience and a search ranking.
That is a fair question, and every support manager should put it to their own operation. A public complaint carries a cost the company can see. A private one carries the same cost, but it shows up later, as a cancellation.
Think about who reaches a company by which route. The customer with a blog and a following gets attention because attention is contagious. The customer on hold for 20 minutes at 6pm, who then hangs up and quietly switches provider, gets nothing, because there is nothing to see.
How do you listen to the quiet customers?
Treat the social channel as one input, not the measure of how well you listen. It tells you what people are willing to say in public. It does not tell you what the phone queue, the email backlog and the abandoned chat sessions are telling you.
Look at abandoned calls by time of day. Read a sample of the tickets that were reopened. Count how many customers had to write twice. These are the customers who did not make noise, and you will not hear from them unless you go and look.
Then ask whether your public replies would survive being applied to everyone. If a tweet gets a same-day answer and an email gets three days, you have built two service levels, and the customer with the larger audience is getting the better one. The same rule applies inside the queue: irate customers are easy to spot, and the ones who are just as unhappy but polite are the ones you lose.
The lesson is the one in the hotel soap story I wrote about earlier this year, in Communication and Customer Service. The guest was not ignored. He was answered by four different people and listened to by none of them. A new channel does not fix that. It gets you more places to answer badly, faster.
Twitter is a good place to start listening. It is a poor place to stop.
