Unless, of course, you can properly staff it.
I know, I know — 100 million people use twitter; 150 million tweets per day are sent; it’s a great way to interact with customers, etc.
There are lots of stories about how Twitter has been used to deliver exceptional customer experiences. Additionally, a number of books can be found on the topic of Twitter — providing everything from the basics, to excellent examples of how to use this powerful tool.
Of course, with the good comes the bad.
This past Sunday, the area in which I live was hit pretty hard by Hurricane Irene. Now, I was prepared for the outage, so it hasn’t had too much of a negative impact. Quite frankly, I’ve enjoyed the peace and quiet that the electrical outage has afforded me.
My power company was quick to direct people to their Twitter feed for updates on restorations. Seeing that they appeared to be responding to people’s tweets regarding the outages, I tweeted them — 3 days ago — and never heard back. Come to find out, they were only responding to a small portion of the tweets they received.
I’m using the above as a fairly drastic example (given the extenuating circumstances with the storm) — but, unfortunately, there are thousands of cases just like this. People have come to expect that if you open an account, they can interact with you. In my case, I’ve essentially been on hold for 3 days, via Twitter. People expect a response just like they would a phone call, email or web form. You wouldn’t let any of those go unanswered, would you?
Don’t make your customers work so hard to contact you. Make sure that if you open a Twitter account (or any other social media channel), you are properly staffed, either internally or externally, to make sure the customer experience is at the level it needs to be.
