Extending the Customer Experience through Twitter

I’ve always considered myself to be a social media early adopter, but I’m not sure if that’s the case any more these days. I know I’m somewhat of a laggard in the social news space. Delicious, Digg, Reddit – I don’t know anything about that.

But when it comes to social networking sites – sure – I’m more willing to at least try out the service. I got a Facebook as soon as I qualified to sign up for an account, I am on Orkut despite my limited Portuguese skills, I did beta for Gravity, I’m linked in on LinkedIn – and yes, I tweet. I think I’ve been tweeting for a couple years now. I’m not sure when I started doing it, but it’s been a while.

I got into twitter at a time when people were still trying to figure out why anyone should use twitter. I mean, for media companies, it was a given: use twitter to promote their most recent articles. I follow the New York Times (@nytimes), Wall Street Journal (@wsj), Wired (@wired), and the Austin-American Statesman (@statesman) to get news right as they’re written. Obviously, many newspapers have done well to utilize twitter during breaking news. When the shootings at Fort Hood occurred, the Statesman (because of Austin’s close proximity to the station) was one of the first to report on it – and they did well to tweet all the latest information they found. And they very effectively continued to utilize twitter in this way: the gunman shooting at the University of Texas, for example. Twitter, for the print industry, is a godsend. News is instantaneous and it can be promoted to hundreds of thousands within seconds.

For B2C companies selling services, twitter has been used to enhance and expand the overall customer service experience. One case that I have witnessed is American Airlines (@AmericanAir). Their twitter account is used less for brand advertising, promotions, or product and more for answering customer complaints.

For a company that positions and prides itself on being the leading airline in America, this is a great step for them to enhance the overall customer experience. If they had a bad one, they can more than likely resolve the issue through this use. How does twitter enhance CSR? First of all, people know they are talking to a person directly and that a real person will tweet them back. The process also takes a much shorter time than calling a 1-800 number and it bypasses having to go through the call center and waiting for a rep.

Of course, there are some issues to this as well, including management of incoming tweets (is this enough for one person to handle?) and the ability to respond in a timely manner.

To go back to American Airlines: my friend lost his bag on one of his flights, he tweeted American Airlines about the problem while he was at the airport, and within a couple of hours, they were able to locate his bag and route it to the proper location. This happened over a year ago, which is pretty amazing considering the general population haven’t realized that Twitter could be used this way. A couple hours at that time seems pretty slow now, but at that time, it seemed like a very quick response. I expect that the response time in the future will continue to get smaller and smaller.