Twitter's Implications for Customer Service

In the past week I have had issues with two businesses that operate exclusively online and needed to get in touch with customer service. In both cases, when traditional customer service channels failed I turned to twitter to contact the company (& found better success).  This has implications for entrepreneurs that want to convey a positive company image online.

As Twitter becomes more popular people can increasingly vent their frustrations with companies or products in a very public way. In my situation, I attempted to contact Amazon Payments and DimDim through their more traditional customer service channels.  First I tried email:

• Amazon Payments did not reply to my email for 36 hours and when they did reply it was clear they had not read my email nor looked at my account history.
• DimDim never replied to my email.

Next I tried phone:

• Amazon Payments has no published phone number and when I called their corporate customer service representatives they indicated they had no phone numbers for anyone in the department.
• DimDim's only listed phone number would ring once then give a busy signal for the two hours I called.
  

Finally, in desperation, I tweeted them.  In both cases my tweet was responsible for my only meaningful support contact with the company.

• @DimDim responded to my tweet almost immediately. Asked clarifying questions about my situation and made a YouTube video showing me how to solve my problem within an hour.
• @AmazonPayments was slower to repsond to my initial tweet (allowing me time to post 5 additional complaints about the company's responsiveness) but eventually initiated an investigation which resulted in fixing a bug in their system and two apologies from the customer service department about how they handled my initial complaint.
  

From a consumers perspective my experience this week was both frustrating and empowering. It is frustrating when companies limit your ability to get meaningful assistance from them so much that you are unable to get serious issues heard. However, it as empowering because  I was able to use social media to get the attention of companies that would not listen to me when I tried to talk to them more privately. 

As an entrepreneur myself, I know finding adequate time to respond to promote your business, build your product and respond to emails and phone calls is challenging. But, you need to recognize that any failures in your offline customer service are likely to come back to haunt you in the Twittersphere!

Labels: amazon payments, customer service, dimdim, twitter