People have been voicing their opinions on blogs for years now but Twitter already seems to have more traction in customer service. Why is that?

The length of comments on Twitter are succinct. It takes much less effort to read them and triage quickly. Don’t underestimate the impact of this. It may be the best part of Twitter for customer service. You can skim 5-6 tweets in the same amount of time it takes to read a single web page. The length also means that tweets are always to the point. They have to be.

The customers are centralized in one place that is easily searched. Really, providing customer service by tracking customers across the entire web is pretty daunting. Twitter gives companies something open that they can focus on. Hashtags make it even easier to filter the noise and people use them naturally so companies don’t have to train their customers.

There is a simple, standard way to send your response. Replying in Twitter is much easier than contacting each blog owner/writer which is a manual process, where the contact forms are frequently designed to foil automation or don’t even exist.

Customer Service Tools are already being built around Twitter. I’ve thought for a few years that companies need a good workflow for information on the web. Good tools were few and far between. Twitter already has companies racing to provide corporate customers the tools they need. Salesforce.com, for example, never did much to address the web but has already started incorporating Twitter for clients. Even the basic desktop and mobile clients for Twitter offer the basic tools needed to track and deal with requests.

As the old GI Joe cartoon used to say, knowing is half the battle. Taking action is always  critical but the effort required to listen to customers is getting much easier with Twitter.

A major concern with social media, for large companies is that they can’t control the conversation any longer. In the past, individuals couldn’t afford to blanket the airwaves with a commercial about their problem. Companies could and they grew very large. There was no balance of power between customer and large business. Companies have taken advantage of that intentionally and unintentionally. Social media (twitter, blogs, Facebook, etc.) give consumers a voice and it’s slowly restoring the balance of power. Now it’s up to the companies to address this change.

My question is this: If Comcast can provide 3 hour response to a Twitter complaint, why can’t they do that for complaints that originate from a phone call? Either they can and haven’t been because there wasn’t an incentive or they can’t and the more popular twitter becomes, the worse twitter customer service will get.

I like to think social media is a reconning for companies that haven’t been giving customers the attention they deserve. Power is balancing out and companies are going to have to do more than open a Twitter account to survive. They’re going to have to address people’s problems and their own service.

Let me hear your comments and please take the polls:

What was your twitter customer service experience?

How does twitter impact customer service?