You may or may not have noticed the increasing number of Twitter based customer service helpdesks. These are popping up in all industries and Twitter has proved to be an ideal tool for providing support to customers.
Some good examples are:
So the question here is, should all businesses follow suit? I found myself tweeting a business with a question a few days ago and received no reply. I felt somewhat disappointed. If I’d sent the question via their customer service form on their website, I expect I would have got a reply.
Was my tweet ignored? Did it slip through due to high volume or inefficient monitoring tools? Perhaps that particular business doesn’t operate a ‘Twitter helpdesk’ – should they?
My view is yes. There’s a lot of value that can be added here and it falls largely into the responsive nature of businesses who are already utilising social media. Why are they on the social networks in the first place? Because that’s where their customers are.
So if your customers want to use Twitter as a helpdesk, should you respond accordingly and let them?