The plus side of twitter – instant support
Support is one of the big plus sides of twitter and it only works due to the size of twitter. How it works is dependant on what you want support for but technology is right up there. What am I talking about well let me explain.
I started off in the online Q&A world with Experts Exchange and at the time one thing that bugged me was having to go to the site, and refresh it to find any new posts. if there wasn’t any there it would be very time consuming. This still applies to newsgroups and forums, but I’m not getting in to that religious debate.
So why is twitter any better?
I ask a question and as long as someone is listening I may get an answer, the beauty is that it is one to one. The normal support route is
- I fill in a form on a website
- It notifies someone maybe sends an email to a distribution list
- The person logs into the site to send me an response
- I get an email response (may have to go to the website
- I email back further info
- the system notifies the user
- the log into the site, find my details
- send me a response
- I get the answer
- etc, etc.
With twitter,
- I ask the world a question
- The person listening gets the response and replies
- I reply back
- I get the answer
The beauty is that anyone can be listening, often the people that have the best answers don’t work for the company (just look at newsgroups and forums)
Now you might say that most people aren’t listening. Well there again is a benefit of twitter, I know to expect a response quickly if I don’t then I would expect my question to have been lost in the noise of twitter, and so I then resort to the formal route.
Any company that isn’t embracing twitter as a mechanism for communicating with their users/clients is missing a trick.