[As luck would have it, as I was writing this entry, my home cable high-speed Internet connection -- the subject of this entry -- went down again. It got better, though.]
I recently had a couple of customer service experiences with my cable company, which happens to have garnered a bunch of accolades for having a strong presence on Twitter. Okay, fine, I’ll just say it, it’s Comcast. This isn’t about Comcast, though, really — it’s just a convenient series of anecdotes on customer service in the online age.
Despite all the hype about Comcast being on Twitter, in this case, for me to go through Twitter just seemed gratuitous and superfluous. This is because I would have ended up direct messaging them with my account details, anyway, so I just e-mailed them directly at their customer support email (the one listed on their Twitter profile page).
Unless you need realtime feedback from the person having the problem, e-mail is generally more efficient than chat (text or voice), since most of your time is spent waiting for something to happen. So in this case, we see that Twitter is useful primarily for monitoring potential problems, publicly showing that you’re responding, and then directing people into a more efficient problem resolution process.
That particular issue was resolved pretty quickly — it turned out that my cable lineup had changed (like most people, the only thing I read on my bill is the number that has the dollar sign next to it), so I had to reluctantly join the ranks of digital cable subscribers.
Soon after that, though, both my broadband access and entire cable went down — I called it in, and got the recorded message that it was a known issue in my area being worked on, and was given the option to get a callback when the issue was resolved. Now, that last bit is useful, and I don’t remember having that option before, so of course I hit yes.
Not much later that evening, I got the automated call saying that the issue was repaired. Cool. I turned on my TV.
No dice.
I called the customer service folks again, and was told that the problem was still being worked on. (So why the automated all-clear call?) Then not more than two minutes later, everything came back up. So either the techs had finished up the work, or the “problem resolved” report was a few minutes out of sync with the actual fix.
This raises a point about raised expectations — you’d better deliver on them. Giving out inaccurate information in real time is as bad or worse (probably worse) than being slow, or not giving out the information in the first place. And being off by just a few minutes (or seconds, even) makes you look bad. It’s tricky.
What’s the point of all this, other than me whining about my cable? It means that even though all the individual pieces are there: Monitoring of public discussions on Twitter; e-mail support queues; having technicians in the field, CSRs on the phone, and robocallers all working off the same info — a disconnect of a few minutes will kill you. Hey, consumers are a tough crowd.
Anyway, I’m glad to see folks are trying with new tools and techniques. I think back to the bad old days, when there weren’t status Web sites or text message alerts; when a repair person couldn’t call to tell you when they were running late, or you had to spend all day camped out next to your phone. And forget about getting new phone service set up.
So, as you can see, I barely talked about Twitter. Do you have any tales of customer service with an online component that you’d like to share? Leave a comment.
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