You have a complaint against a brand or service. You tried contacting customer service but nothing happened. You wrote an email to customer service department but nothing happened. You sent a reminder but it did not help much. And you feel helpless, dissatisfied with this 'take it or leave it' attitude of companies. But hey, wait. Help is pouring in from new channel. Twitter.
More and more number of people are using Twitter to register their complaints. Good thing is that they are getting responses and resolutions from their service providers. And Help pours in faster.
As hotels, airlines and other travel companies line up on Twitter to promote their brands, customers who voice their grievances in the form of tweets are getting surprisingly fast responses for everything from bad airplane seats to poor room service.
More and more number of brands have started using Twitter to promote their promotions, to connect better with customers and to monitor conversations. Since they are on it, they are also able to hear positive and negative feedback about their service and brand.
Reason cited for this kind of service is viral nature of Twitter. Every Twitterer (I think I invented this word) worth his salt has some number of followers to whom they retweet their grievance and thus bad word spreads. They not only get help but they get it in record time. On one instance, a person spent 30 minutes on phone with call centre representative but no resolution provided. After that he tweeted his concern and he got resolution in 19 minutes!
It is sad to see that after spending huge amount of money on call centre technologies, buying best of CRM systems, hiring best of the customer service representatives and building state of the art offices, companies prefer to put their efficiencies behind a free service.
Is Twitter going to revolutionize customer service? I do not think so. Right now it is new tool and most of the companies are testing waters. In most of the companies it is in a project stage where it is being monitored by marketing directors, customer service heads and hence faster responses. Once a process sets in, it will follow the path treaded by other high profile technologies. And customers have to find a new way to resolve their complaints.
Till then, as they say, make hay while the sun shines. What is your take?
by Ramesh , on July 5, 2009 5:49 AM
You hit the nail on the head Adesh - "Once a process sets in ....". This is what beats me . Processes are supposed to make things more efficient right ? But when it comes to customer service, almost any process destroys it. Maybe the beast is such that you should have no process at all !
by Vipul Grover , on July 5, 2009 8:29 AM
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by A journey called Life , on July 5, 2009 4:24 PM
ohh wow.. am sure this medium is going to find a set of dedicated users.. and its now time to kick some a@@
by Dhiman , on July 6, 2009 12:30 PM
A little similar thing happened last week when actor Gul Panag started complaining about bad service provided by the manufacturer(a renowned MNC) her washer/dryer of and tweople that is her followers pitched in with lots of comments and Re-tweets, I don't know what happened to her washer/dryer as she didnot tweet about it being fixed or not but tweeter is certainly being used in a different ways...
and organizations need to be wary of these things before jumping onto the tweeter bandwagon ...
by preposterous girl , on July 8, 2009 9:56 AM
Oh yes.. retweeting the things definitely brings the point in question to the limelight and so will be the case 4 the complaints against some particular brand..
I'm yet to find out Aviva life insurance company on twitter.have lots of complaints against the company.. :|
by preposterous girl , on July 12, 2009 1:14 PM
my comments section is not wrkng so just checking if its prob with blogger or only on my blog delete it if u want later .Thanx