Reading Doug Meachem’s post on his experience with the Best Buy CMO, Chris Brogan’s reaction and Scott Monty’s commentary (in Doug’s blog post) on the actual stresses of being the “front and center person,” a thought hit me.
Twitter is going to die as it becomes the most important customer service tool since the phone. Not in that it’s going away, but this “instant access” to higher ups and ultra-personal touch is simply not scalable… therefore it’s current direct access and charm is going to fade away. The spirit of Twitter’s “authentic” two-way interactions will be replaced with 140 character versions of the help binders so many customer service folks work with today. In short – it’ll be like email. When email first came out, it was a nice note; a hug, something to look forward to. Now, whole jobs and offices are devoted to handling email and it’s the scourge of many a worker who fear the next message that appears. If we get anything that feels remotely like a hug via, it’s much less common than it used to be.
It’s an insane expectation to have one person listening constantly and for them to be on point the whole time – the only thing that will make sense is a team devoted to it, 24-7 because social media works that way (unless you decide that you’re going to have customer service Twitter business hours, which I wouldn’t be surprised if it happened). Some folks are devoting low cost interns to this, but that’s a strategy fraught with danger.
Listening to Buzz Out Loud the other day, they talked about the DISH network support team and the fact that it’s a side project handled by folks higher up on the escalation path – and the people want to do it because they find it interesting. They’re only handling a couple hundred cases a day – but what about when it grows to be on par with phone support (it could, you know). Molly Wood and the Buzz Crew openly speculated that once everyone finds it, Twitter is going to lose it’s luster as being a “direct route” to help. It will no longer then have it’s cache as a direct connection, but in my opinion by that time it will be so adopted by the masses it won’t matter.
This leads into another point – if it’s going to be a customer service tool, there’s a cost.
Having talked to various businesses, there’s severe trepidation for getting involved in social media and Twitter as a customer service tool because once you’re in, you have an even higher expectation set for involvement than if you’re absent. Many companies’ lawyers are having conniptions at the idea of publicly viewable real-time chat where humans can make mistakes. It is, to many who social media is not a part of their lives, another cost with questionable return in their minds.
What are your thoughts on scaling? Do you think that there might be a Tweet center, like a call center is today, with cube farms powered by caffeine and chai tea – or will Twitter be able to retain it’s directly social nature? Why? Do you have some data on using Twitter as a customer service tool?
Great article, definitely food for thought!
IMHO, we will see some of everything you mentioned, if possibly only a result of you thinking of it, but I’m sure others are already part way there!
But the optimist in me, thinks that as even some celebrities respond to fan mail personally individuals, professionals, celebrity and politic alike will continue to use twitter to pass along that one 2 one warm fuzzy hug…
You’ve touched on something I’m struggling with which is that Twitter really isn’t just another form of “social media” it’s a process and workflow tool, customer support too — as much as it is a “media” and the reason I disagree with your premise is that I think because it can be whatever we want it to be, we will figure out ways of ensuring its survival. The ROI will be there — whether its in improved customer service, lower customer churn rates or whatever, I’m guessing that enough organizations like Dell will see it as a money maker and invest in making it work
BUt then I’m an incurable optimist.