Twitter: As A Customer Service Tool ?

In my last post about Twitter I wrote about how business need to move to brand themselves with Twitter names.  As I was writing that post, a thought came to me as to how businesses can also use Twitter as an important tool in customer service.

After a company has taken the step to create a user-name on Twitter in order to interact with the social timeline, I think they can use it for more than a simple “echo chamber” as my friend Andrew Wright calls it.  There are possibilities beyond just a product announcement.  For instance, how about a quasi help desk ?

If you are a small company, it may not be feasible to set up a help desk with dedicated communications.  Instead you can use Twitter.  Take that company branded  Twitter name and distribute the password for the account it to a team of “customer service representatives”.  These reps need not be sitting in a central place, or even in an office for that matter.  During the course of the day they simply follow replies to the company’s Twitter name.  Now the customers of this company simply send any questions, technical or otherwise, to the company’s Twitter name.  Almost instantaneously one of the reps sees the tweet and sends a reply, either in the form of a reply of direct message if necessary.  This interaction will not only benefit the customer who sent it, but many other customers who may have been having, or may have in the future, the same issue.  It is help page forum, but in real time.  Fort example:

Say I am using a product of  @company and  encounter an issue, any issue. I could send a Twitter message to @company stating my problem or asking a question.  One of the company’s reps would see the message in the companies timeline and respond.  No more waiting on hold.  If the problem requires further consult, maybe a call is necessary at that point, but for most issues, a few messages back and forth would more than likely solve the issue.

This is yet another way Twitter’s infrastructure could be leveraged by a small company to provide superior service to it’s customers at little to no cost.