RSS
Home
Social media community helps Twitter deliver customer service during crisis
Print
Email
RSS
Subscribe
Yesterday Twitter was rocked and the world of social media shook. The official story says human error caused thousands of unplanned (and inappropriate) account suspensions on Twitter. But the social media community is still buzzing with rumors of an attack on Twitter in the form of a "spam cloud". We may never know the whole story. As of last night Twitter's only public comment was a slim 69 word response on their blog.
I had a special seat to view this particular debacle.
My account (@kevinstirtz) was one of those accidentally suspended accounts. While this was shocking enough it was made worse by Twitter's dim response. After filing a request to have my account reinstated all I got was an auto response from their help desk system. I never heard another peep from them.
By Sunday evening I was angry and confused. And that would have continued had it not been for the magical workings of our social media web.Because the community was abuzz with the Twitter happenings, I quickly learned the problem was not me. Thousands of others had been dealt the same hand.
Through the social media web I also learned what the rumored cause was, what official explanation was and that things were being fixed forthwith. (Special thanks to the rock stars at Mashable.com for connecting with Twitter HQ and helping the world understand what was going on.)
This was tremendously helpful. Finally, I could relax and quit worrying about it.
As a person who makes his living helping companies improve their customer service, I see a lot to talk about in this incident.
Twitter's response could have been much better. If they wanted to minimize the impact this situation had on their customers, they should have responded faster (much faster) and with more detail. In the real-time nano-second updating world of social media, hours are like days. Add to that the emotional roller coaster a typical customer might feel at being banished from the kingdom and you have a perfect storm of bad customer experience.
Don't think I dislike the Twitter Team. I admire them. And in many ways they've done a wonderful job in a difficult situation. Let's face it, their massive success has made a mountain of work for them. I don't envy their many and varied challenges.
And, if yesterday is an example, one of their big challenges is how they treat their customers. Customers who routinely get lousy service will eventually look elsewhere. Even Twitter has competition and it's growing. They could have helped thousands of their customers have a much better experience yesterday by communicating more quickly, more directly and more completely.
Sometimes delivering better customer service means nothing more than communicating better. Do that and you'll keep your fans cheering for you. Fail at that and you'll risk losing them to another team faster than you can say "your account has been suspended".
Related Articles:
Comments
.JPG)
