
Ask HN: How companies use Twitter for customer service? - diorray
I&#x27;m wondering about how companies use Twitter for customer service.
Are they periodically search for &quot;company name&quot; tweets to contact with customer via DM or tweet?<p>And if they&#x27;re giving password of Twitter account to support staff, how they rely on the staff?
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jcutrell
Most of the companies doing customer support via Twitter are either very small
(as in, 20-100 people) or very large (as in major banking companies).

In both cases, very few people handle the Twitter accounts in general, and
usually they reveal some part of their identity. Some companies decide to
create multiple customer service accounts for multiple people as well.

My guess is, they have some power-user applications running some searches for
key words (obviously company names) and maybe, if they are really serious,
some sentiment analysis (e.g. "Regions sucks!" is much more important than
"headed to Regions then to lunch.")

The larger companies will hire a small team, or may add this to the
responsibility list of someone who they feel takes initiative. Companies like
MediaTemple have customer support folks who monitor this like any other
channel, with a scheduled switchoff to other support reps. Small companies
have someone doing this and usually many other tasks at the same time.

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asafira
This isn't directly related to the question, but I wanted to share my story
anyway: I successfully used Twitter when I had some issues with Expedia.

Long story short, one leg of my flight was cancelled and I instead took a bus.
I was promised I would get a refund with 2 weeks, yada yada, and I end up not
getting it. After 2-3 more phone calls and similar cycles, I get tired and
post to them publicly on twitter and facebook.

Lo and behold, they got on the case immediately and I got my refund in the
next day or two.

Is there a moral there though? Should one use twitter and/or facebook to give
a company poor publicity and then have them specially take care of you?
Unclear, but since this was a case where I had already tried to deal with them
on the phone 3-4 times, I felt justified.

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talktomillie
My two cents: there are companies providing social media CRM services that
provide real time 1\. market sentiment on their customers opinions 2\. alert
when complaining tweets require client service to follow up. The monitored
tweet volume is very small as the key words are mostly limited to company
names or key products. Especially most complain directly @company handle. Most
of this can be done manually, to take my previous CPG client as an example,
people from each merchandise group manually check the amazon review on the
product skew they run and work with customer service together to follow up on
bad reviews. They try really hard to collect online feedback to understand
what people like and not like about the products.

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andrewhillman
They do it the same way as narcissistic techies do it. They "listen" for @
mentions throughout the day via twitter clients. Years ago I tweeted about
comcast service issues and 5 min later I received a phone call from a comcast
service manager. They must have a customer service team who deals with
customers on twitter and a small team of "managers" who jump on cases to put
out the fires that need immediate attention.

