Now a days, we see a lot of companies are using
Twitter to bridge the gap in the customer service departments. While many companies are still embracing the dreaded phone tree system, many companies have since added
Twitter accounts to try and decrease wait times for customers, and solve easier problems over the internet rather than the phone. Well our friends at Fortune Magazine recently put the
Twitter system to the test and the results are interesting. According to the very informal test, the phone was still the most reliable way to get problems solved. Fortune posted questions to cable companies, airlines, banks and several shopping sites, as well as simultaneously called those companies, and they found that
Twitter while a great new development in the customer service world, was not able to solve every problem, and a lot of times it was easier to just call the company and explain the problem. Apparently 140 characters, the allotted amount of characters used in a
Twitter message, was often too little to be able to explain the problem.
Twitter however was relatively effective at solving smaller problems like having a cable box reset, but larger more complicated problems required a phone call to the company as the back and forth between the customer and the CSR often dragged on to longer lengths. Companies that use
Twitter should be commended for embracing technology to help solve customer service problems, but the customer service world hasn't reached the tipping point yet in terms of fully being able to abandon the old school phone system for the internet based
Twitter system.
For more on the Fortune Magazine study that includes specific companies, as well as the requests that Fortune made to them,
click here.
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Posted by GetHuman on Thu, 17 Feb 2011 3:45pm