Sabrina Parsons posted For the best customer service: TWEET! on her MommyCEO blog earlier this month. She’d called customer service repeatedly, left messages and gotten no response. Then she tweeted about it, and this (the photo below) is what she got: a new, replacement pair of shoes for her son.
This could seem like a good story of a good company, but there’s that dark side to it, the bad service first, followed by good service after it appeared on Twitter. She said:
Here is a company that produces an excellent product and seems to care about customers. But their customer service process is broken. If only those of us who tweet can get good customer care–then they need to fix their process. Don’t get me wrong, though–I love the personal attention I can get from companies via Twitter. But I know those days are numbered. At some point there will be too many people doing the same thing, and Twitter won’t be a good communication vehicle. So companies like this need to fix their customer service issues NOW.
I agree with her conclusion. Twitter is new and exciting, a classic shiny new thing that we can all play with. But mind the telephone in the meantime.
Tim Berry is the founder and chairman of Palo Alto Software and Bplans.com. Follow him on Twitter @Timberry.
