At the SES Canada conference yesterday, there was, not surprisingly, a lot of talk about Twitter. Most of it had to do with whether Twitter is truly emerging as a search rival to Google – something the SEO and SEM aficionados dismissed as unlikely.
More interesting – at least to me – was the talk during the Twitter panel in which I participated about Twitter’s growing value as a customer service tool – a topic that continued during dinner with Freshbooks’ Mike Macderment and Rayanne Langdon, and PR veteran Michael O’Connor Clarke.
There was an animated discussion about how Twitter leverage the Web to offer a new, different and better kind of customer service. Unlike impersonal and frustrating telephone-based customer service systems, Twitter lets companies dynamically engage and build relationships with their customers.
The ability to provide information, solve problems, address issues and have conversations in real-time is a powerful tool that doesn’t get as much attention as it should when people talk about Twitter. The opportunity to provide better and different customer service is perhaps the single most important reason why companies, particularly consumer-facing ones, should use Twitter. For these kind of companies to not use Twitter is a strategic and operational mistake.
A great example of a company effectively leverage Twitter to provide amazing customer service is Zappos but there are tons of other companies being as successful. Freshbooks, which provides online invoicing services, is one of them. If you’re a consumer-facing company, the approach to Twitter taken by Zappos and Freshbooks is definitely worth emulating.
Technorati Tags: freshbooks, twitter, zappos
One Comment
It's certainly a very interesting talk about how Twitter leverage the Web to offer a new, different and better kind of customer service.
It certainly able to replace / upgrade the old impersonal and frustrating telephone-based customer service systems, Twitter lets companies dynamically engage and build relationships with their customers