Is Twitter Part of Your Customer Service & Support Strategy?
Customer Service Experience 16 Comments
Is Twitter Part of Your Customer Service Strategy?
Popular social media channel – Twitter – provides an open forum for customers to air their grievances, give praise or simply inquire about an organization’s products, services or support. These customer sentiments and inquiries are valuable sources of information and smart companies will take the opportunity to collect, measure and act upon this knowledge.
Insight into the perception of your brand, products, or services provides the ideal opportunity for customer service teams to step up their service techniques. In a Mashable’s article “HOW TO: Use Twitter for Customer Service” they nicely articulate the major tenants of customer service and how they relate to Twitter: problem resolution – it’s the main goal of customer service and Twitter provides a platform for a fast, easy response possibly in a single tweet; positive brand image – when someone receives service they like, they talk about it and Twitter provides a viral platform to spread the word which can lead to more sales and more attention; staff involvement – Twitter provides a more interesting platform for support representatives to serve the customer and provides immediate visibility into the impact they make; cost reduction – what every support organization wants and with Twitter it’s necessary to be short and to the point reducing the time required to solve each problem.
Additionally, customer service and support software integrations with social channels provide a unique opportunity for companies to monitor customer feedback, recognize trends and be proactive. In the CRM June ‘09 issue a Datamonitor analyst says “savvy companies should recognize that social networking can be another channel for customer support.” And a recent survey by SupportIndustry.com showed that 32% of respondents expect social networking apps to play a role in their support within the next year.
Tell us how social media fits into your support strategy. Is your organization leveraging Twitter for support? Is your organization monitoring Twitter or any social media channels? Are you part of the 32% that expect social networking apps such as Twitter to play a role in your support in the next year?
Come on now, seriously? Twitter is the only social media channel you recognize?
Seriously?
I said it before and I will say it again. Twitter is the poorest example of a channel for customer service. First, there is no integration (for the most part) with other systems so you don’t know who the person calling in via Twitter is or have any way (other than YAAPP – yet another application) to get the info about their account, history, etc. Need data to integrate? how quick can you CTRL-C, CTRL-V?
Second, Twitter has a very small limit in 140 chars. How many problems can you really solve in 140 chars? 280? 560 even?. Nah, not really lot of value you can provide there… sure, you can shoot back links, but why waste time and money in twitter, improve your self-service system instead.
Third, there is no automation (yet) available for twitter. Which means you are going to spend a lot of cycles and time going back-and-forth without solving or understanding an issue – versus an interactive online or web self-service solution.
Fourth, Twitter is not free. I know shocking. However, you have to either dedicate a program or a person to listen to twitter, get the information and act on it. You have to worry about the technology costs (at the very least this person needs a computer with access to corporate systems and kb – are you close to the average 28K for new people or 12K for existing?), the people cost (what is the fully loaded for a FTE in your org? 80K? 100K?) training costs (of course this goes beyond what you already baked into the fully-loaded figure above), develop, launch and enforce policies, etc. etc. etc. i think you get the idea
Finally, for now – there are lots more really, and sorta going back to integration, there is no link to biz rules, to km, or to any other system to help you solve or manage the interaction.
32% of companies are simply responding to a question with a half-answer so they won’t look bad – but they really are not going to deploy Twitter for CS since there is no value provided to either the customer or the company from doing so. And they will figure that out very, very soon and take back their “plans”.
Want to really get value our of social media for customer service? forget twitter, focus on communities (and maybe include FB and some other select friends).
I am just saying…
Esteban,
Thank you for taking the time to comment on the blog. While all of your points are well taken, of course Twitter is not the only social media channel we recognize, however it is one of the most popular and talked about social media platforms, today, so it was chosen as a topic of discussion. The title of this blog is “Is Twitter PART of Your Customer Service & Support Strategy?”
As a provider of a multi-channel software suite dedicated to customer service and support, we would never endorse only using a social media channel for support or only one particular platform. However, social media is one of the newest channels to be leveraged to supplement that support and therefore is a hot topic to be explored. It provides an ideal platform to measure and monitor customer sentiment regarding your product, services and brand. Support software integrations with Twitter empower organizations to efficiently monitor tweets for proactive response via an appropriate channel. It enables the option of a quick response via Twitter or the opportunity to respond and continue the support through another available support channel.
“Social media monitoring and multi-channel support options are essential to providing superior customer service and support to today’s consumers,” stated Datamonitor, Senior Analyst, Customer Interaction Technologies, Ian Jacobs. “Each has an important role, one enabling customer sentiment the other providing a support channel of choice. Integrating customer support software with social channels provides a unique opportunity for companies to monitor customer feedback, recognize trends and be proactive.”
Of course any available social media channels can and should be utilized for customer service. Twitter is just one available option that was the focus of this particular blog and the fact is younger consumers are drawn to Twitter and do not hesitate to quickly share their customer experiences – positive or negative.
Thank you for opening the discussion and relaying your thoughts on the use of this particular social media channel.
I agree on using Twitter or any other social network as an extra channel to take care of customers.
For example, I was just looking at how Blockbuster is doing it now through their Twitter account http://twitter.com/blockbuster They basically take any negative tweets and forward them to their customer care department, so they can solve the issue through the regular channels (tickets, forums, knowledgebase, etc.) I think this is the right way to use Twitter for your customer service. Many companies are creating integrations that enable companies to efficiently monitor tweets for just this purpose.
I noticed lately that the forums and blogs I manage for a given product are getting very few visitors compared to my Twitter profile for the same product. Potential and existing customers are more likely to communicate with me via Twitter nowadays. I’ve used it for customer care and sales and it’s been of great help thus far. As a PR/contact developing tool, Twitter is terrific.
I have spent twenty years consulting customer service and am thrilled that companies are opening up to *multiple communication channels that are open to customers. Twitter has come on strong and companies need to consider the power it has on their brands. The pulse of the customer doesn’t just beat through your company’s systems and website.
Keep as far a reach on your brand as possible!
Esteban … Timely up-to-date topic. Many thanks.
Kate Nasser
My apologies for the confusion. I was moving very quickly and typed the wrong name. I realize Esteban disagrees and that’s cool. I still think that multiple channels is key.
Best wishes,
Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach
First,
Kate – no problems on the confusion (at least on my side).
Second,
I don’t think you (parature) read my comments well enough. I never said not to use Twitter at all, I said that is a poor excuse of a channel for customer service. If you are going to do it, you have to decide what do you want to do with it. As Matthew said above, most people are using it to see problems and then escalating them. That is fine, I guess, but if you are going to do that then automate it.
Integrate with Twitter, sure, but for the purpose of monitoring automatically, creating tickets and then having someone follow-up through other channel. It is delusional to think that you can solve a problem in 140 chars, and going back-and-forth to have a conversation is frustrating for the customer and far from a decent experience.
I never, Kate, said no to multi-channel. I have been proposing INTEGRATED multi-channel management for almost ten years now, and I have created and published architectures and models for it, as well as assisted countless customers with it. I totally believe in multi-channel solutions, just not stand-alone (which is another of the problems I have with Twitter). Sure, you can monitor twitter, but then all you do is just look at the stream and manually look up the customers, look up the solution in the KB, look up the customer data, look up the business rules, and then compose a manual answer and send it. The you still need to document it in the customer record, etc. Integration so that Twitter transactions are presented via the same screen contact center agents use, leverage the KB, Biz rules, queues, etc. is what makes sense… but there i no one yet that has done that.
Even something as simple as modifying the data model to accommodate Twitter names can help a lot in reducing the number of back-and-forth by pulling up a record… but not one has yet done that.
Anyways, I can go on about the shortcomings of Twitter as a channel for service. I believe there is a lot of value in monitoring and using the channel, just not to provide service. I wrote in more detail on my blog about the problems it has, and how to solve them as well.
BL: use Twitter, but don’t call it an “integrated” channel unless you have done all the integration and has become another real channel. And if you are going to use it for monitoring, make sure your customers understand that and are prepared to use it only as a way to start a ticket and get help through some other channel.
PS – btw, you did not even mention using Twitter for feedback, not just to monitor problems, and feeding that back into the organization, or how to measure Twitter for CS to ensure success, etc. Those are topics that should also be covered…
Thanks for providing the space for this great conversation. I’d be glad to continue this here, of offline if you prefer. I think you are starting something interesting, but want to make sure you follow-through with a killer product, not just responding to the fad.
Since Twitter only represents a tiny fraction of social networking traffic, why would a company elect to use Parature rather than something like Radian6 to monitor how their brand is perceived in social media?
It seems to me that one should use software that allows broad brand monitoring and that customer service issues should be directed from this software to one’s customer support software as appropriate.
Seems to me like Parature is quick to jump on what is hot in the market with a solution that is far to shallow to add true value.
Esteban and Joe have asked some interesting questions.
It seems like Parature is doing some interesting things, but pretty “shallow” as joe states.
It would be interesting to get Parature to address the questions posed rather than just putting out some marketing copy.
I noticed some good questions over the weekend asking for a real response to Esteban (rather than marketing copy) and also asking why someone would use Parature over a solution like Radian6 that covers much more than Twitter.
Why did you delete them?
This is far from transparent.
To clarify why some comments are being deleted from the Parature Blog, the Customer Service Experience section of this blog is for conversation regarding what’s hot in the market, best practices and industry trends, not for product promotion from Parature or other companies. For companies that would like to debate specific products there are plenty of 3rd party blog sites to do so. For those who would like to know what is going on at Parature and to specifically discuss our product and integrations, please visit the What’s Happening at Parature section of the blog.
Thanks to everyone who has posted valuable and appropriate discussion points.
Esteban,
Our intent for this blog is to open discussion on topics of interest within customer service and have customers, as well as others, openly discuss their thoughts on the topic.
So, let’s take these points of discussion line by line.
August 6, 2009
Esteban:
Come on now, seriously? Twitter is the only social media channel you recognize?
Seriously?
Parature:
I think we already acknowledged this comment, but will do so again. Of course Twitter is not the only social media channel we recognize, however it is one of the most popular and talked about social media platforms, today, so it was chosen as a topic of discussion.
Twitter is the first one we’ve integrated for an out-of-the-box solution, customers are able to use our email to ticket and API capabilities to do additional integrations as they wish.
Esteban:
I said it before and I will say it again. Twitter is the poorest example of a channel for customer service. First, there is no integration (for the most part) with other systems so you don’t know who the person calling in via Twitter is or have any way (other than YAAPP – yet another application) to get the info about their account, history, etc. Need data to integrate? how quick can you CTRL-C, CTRL-V?
Parature:
Our customers asked us to provide a way for their customer service teams to monitor Twitter so they can capture customer tweets so they can see trends and respond to the tweets in the appropriate manner. Parature delivered on this customer request. Customer service software companies are integrating, to a certain extent, with Twitter and their customers are asking for it. What we are seeing in the community is that companies simply want an easy way to monitor sentiment across several support channels and now also Twitter. At this early stage, our customers tell us they are mostly experimenting with Social CRM with the hopes that it will be a useful support channel. As they figure that out they want a way to monitor customer sentiment and leverage this valuable information within the support team. That said, its quickly becoming a support channel for some as they setup a Twitter Queue, tweets are isolated from other support traffic so support representatives can review them independently of other support channels, then grab a tweet to respond to the tweeter (like any other support issue might be worked), route them for handling by other resources or delete them when appropriate. At this stage a tweet is being treated as any other support issue, its being responded to or routed appropriately. Once they have been routed, the history is captured in the account. You may not immediately know all the personal or account information regarding the person tweeting, but by entering them or finding them within your customer service software you have now captured the history and can manage the support. All integrations must start somewhere and I think as the channel grows, so will the level of integration.
I believe the question “how quick can you CTRL-C, CTRL-V is rhetorical, but I will answer it anyway. I can do it in about 3 seconds.
Esteban:
Second, Twitter has a very small limit in 140 chars. How many problems can you really solve in 140 chars? 280? 560 even?. Nah, not really lot of value you can provide there… sure, you can shoot back links, but why waste time and money in twitter, improve your self-service system instead.
Parature:
Agreed, I don’t think anyone truly thinks that you can resolve a customer service issue in 140 characters. But that isn’t the point…the bigger picture is to not ignore that person because they are your customer and they do have an issue. So go ahead and send them a link to a knowledgebase article or send them a link to your self-service portal (all which fit within 140 characters by the way) where they can do their own search, submit a ticket or chat with your service rep. I don’t think it has to be “all or none.” If I tweet and someone replies with a brief answer, or a link to get an answer to my questions I call that support.
Esteban:
Third, there is no automation (yet) available for twitter. Which means you are going to spend a lot of cycles and time going back-and-forth without solving or understanding an issue – versus an interactive online or web self-service solution.
Parature:
The integration does pull the data into the customer service software where, as mentioned above, it can then be handled via another support channel or even responded to directly back through twitter. You don’t have to spend lots of cycles going back and forth, you can take proactive action with a quick response via Twitter to show the customer you are interested in their issue and then provide the opportunity to continue the support through another available support channel. This may require a few extra steps, but is a better option than just ignoring your customer’s tweet.
Esteban:
Fourth, Twitter is not free. I know shocking. However, you have to either dedicate a program or a person to listen to twitter, get the information and act on it. You have to worry about the technology costs (at the very least this person needs a computer with access to corporate systems and kb – are you close to the average 28K for new people or 12K for existing?), the people cost (what is the fully loaded for a FTE in your org? 80K? 100K?) training costs (of course this goes beyond what you already baked into the fully-loaded figure above), develop, launch and enforce policies, etc. etc. etc. i think you get the idea
Parature:
With the integration, you do not have to dedicate a program or person to monitor Twitter – it is automatically routed into the Twitter Queue on the Parature Service Desk for the existing customer service reps to easily see and monitor while continuing with their assigned tasks. Therefore, no extra costs for a computer with access to systems and KB because they already have it and no $28k for a new person or $12k for an existing person because they already have the people as well…no 80k, no 100k. Additionally, there is no training cost because your support reps already know how to use the software. Some of them are just being asked to monitor an additional support queue. Everything runs exactly the same as it previously did, you are just adding another queue with visibility into another channel of support.
Esteban:
Finally, for now – there are lots more really, and sorta going back to integration, there is no link to biz rules, to km, or to any other system to help you solve or manage the interaction.
Parature:
Again, some systems may operate that way but for our customers Twitter Queue tweets are captured and support representatives can review them, then route them via a ticket for an appropriate response with all the support of their existing customer service software to manage the interaction. This includes business rules, links to knowledge articles etc. etc. etc.
Esteban:
32% of companies are simply responding to a question with a half-answer so they won’t look bad – but they really are not going to deploy Twitter for CS since there is no value provided to either the customer or the company from doing so. And they will figure that out very, very soon and take back their “plans”.
Parature:
Esteban, I say this with all due respect, but quite frankly you taking the liberty of defining people’s thoughts at to why they responded to a survey saying that they expect social apps to play a role in their support. And the bigger point, nobody said they were planning to deploy Twitter for customer service, only that they expect social apps to play a role. Let’s put the quote back into perspective here “And a recent survey by SupportIndustry.com showed that 32% of respondents expect social networking apps to play a role in their support within the next year.”
Esteban:
Want to really get value our of social media for customer service? forget twitter, focus on communities (and maybe include FB and some other select friends).
I am just saying…
Parature:
I don’t think that social media is going away anytime soon, so should organizations really just ignore what is being said about them via these channels or should they try to respond in a proactive manner to keep their customers happy and protect their brand?
August 15, 2009
Esteban:
First,
Kate – no problems on the confusion (at least on my side).
Parature:
None on our side either…thanks for the comments.
Esteban:
Second,
I don’t think you (parature) read my comments well enough. I never said not to use Twitter at all, I said that is a poor excuse of a channel for customer service. If you are going to do it, you have to decide what do you want to do with it. As Matthew said above, most people are using it to see problems and then escalating them. That is fine, I guess, but if you are going to do that then automate it.
Parature:
It’s automated, see previous responses and it’s a complimentary channel for our customers who already use a sophisticated multi-channel support solution. Again, with all due respect, at the end of your last comment you said “Want to really get value out of social media for customer service? forget twitter.”
Bigger view – monitoring and escalation paths are automated via integrations currently available.
Esteban:
Integrate with Twitter, sure, but for the purpose of monitoring automatically, creating tickets and then having someone follow-up through other channel. It is delusional to think that you can solve a problem in 140 chars, and going back-and-forth to have a conversation is frustrating for the customer and far from a decent experience.
Parature:
Again, we agree, I don’t think anyone truly thinks that you can resolve a customer service issue in 140 characters, but you can be proactive. Send them a link to a knowledgebase article or send them a link to your self-service portal where they can do their own search, submit a ticket or chat with your service rep. Send a quick response via Twitter to show the customer you are interested in their issue and then provide the opportunity to continue the support through another available support channel.
Esteban:
I never, Kate, said no to multi-channel. I have been proposing INTEGRATED multi-channel management for almost ten years now, and I have created and published architectures and models for it, as well as assisted countless customers with it. I totally believe in multi-channel solutions, just not stand-alone (which is another of the problems I have with Twitter). Sure, you can monitor twitter, but then all you do is just look at the stream and manually look up the customers, look up the solution in the KB, look up the customer data, look up the business rules, and then compose a manual answer and send it. The you still need to document it in the customer record, etc. Integration so that Twitter transactions are presented via the same screen contact center agents use, leverage the KB, Biz rules, queues, etc. is what makes sense… but there i no one yet that has done that.
Parature:
Organizations are experimenting with social media channels and trying to figure out how to best leverage them to supplement multi-channel support. Tweets are captured and visible on the support reps service desk for review and response with all the support of their existing customer service software, i.e. KB and queues to help manage the interaction. There is a level of manual effort, however, by entering them or finding them within your customer service software you have now captured the history and can effectively manage the support. Again, all integrations must start somewhere and I think as the channel grows, so will the level of integration.
Esteban:
Even something as simple as modifying the data model to accommodate Twitter names can help a lot in reducing the number of back-and-forth by pulling up a record… but not one has yet done that.
Parature:
We see customers starting to do this today, specifically starting with tracking tweets in a separate support queue. Then as they identify specific tweets that they need to respond to, they can then link the tweet to the customer’s incident history to enable the complete view of that customer’s activity and reduce back and forth for the entire support team. Representatives can also view Twitter profiles directly from the system.
Esteban:
Anyways, I can go on about the shortcomings of Twitter as a channel for service. I believe there is a lot of value in monitoring and using the channel, just not to provide service. I wrote in more detail on my blog about the problems it has, and how to solve them as well.
BL: use Twitter, but don’t call it an “integrated” channel unless you have done all the integration and it has become another real channel. And if you are going to use it for monitoring, make sure your customers understand that and are prepared to use it only as a way to start a ticket and get help through some other channel.
Parature:
Again, I think we agree on this point. What we are seeing in the community is that companies simply want an easy way to monitor Twitter and integrate it into their service desk. At this early stage, nobody is really looking to it to serve as an actual support channel, but instead a way to monitor customer sentiment and leverage this valuable information.
Esteban:
PS – btw, you did not even mention using Twitter for feedback, not just to monitor problems, and feeding that back into the organization, or how to measure Twitter for CS to ensure success, etc. Those are topics that should also be covered…
Parature:
Again, I think we agree on this point, we have it, its integrated with their other support features, it’s a complimentary support channel and most are using it for feedback and monitoring today but Parature doesn’t limit our customers to only monitoring. They can also reply to tweets.
Esteban:
Thanks for providing the space for this great conversation. I’d be glad to continue this here, or offline if you prefer. I think you are starting something interesting, but want to make sure you follow-through with a killer product, not just responding to the fad.
Parature:
Esteban, all comments that add value to discussion are welcome. If you would like a full briefing to see our integration in action there we are happy to oblige…just let us know.
Hey Parature – Thank you for your commentary about social media and customer service. Our CEO has made this a priority this year and yet, we are not setup for it. He wants us to find a way to proactively reach out to tweets that are of a customer service nature. Please have someone from your organization contact me so I can see how this will fit into our overall service strategy. We have 17 CSR’s currently and we have a product launch coming up in November. You can contact me on my email address provided in the form. Thank you.
Now that you appear to have been pressured into actually responding to Esteban and are under scrutiny for deleting comments, how about explaining why a company would elect to use your software to monitor tweets rather than using one of the many other programs that goes way beyond Twitter and also monitors thousands of blogs, facebook, etc.?
Margie – Parature has posted a response. In answer to your question – free country. You can use whatever software you want to monitor social media. Parature happens to offer us a way to monitor tweets and capture that information in our customer history which is just want we wanted. Parature gave us a nice option. Are you bothered by that?
Hi Margie,
Thanks for your post.
Parature didn’t want to use this particular forum to self-promote, but since there was interest in our particular integration we were happy to respond to Esteban – we are proud of our integration. As far as the deleted comments go – the comments are there.
Now, to answer your particular question.
If an organization is looking specifically for software to monitor social media then they wouldn’t look to Parature; they would go to a provider that focuses solely on social media monitoring. That being said, as social media channels – as they relate directly to customer service – grow then other Parature integrations may be realized. Parature Customer Service software is exactly that – software for customer service and that is its focus. Our particular integration was developed because several of our customers wanted a way for their customer service teams to easily monitor Twitter from the Parature system.
We would love to get more insight from our readers on the original topic and to find out “Is Twitter part of your customer service and support strategy?”