Smart Customer Service Lessons: Responding Faster To Complaints About Your Competitors
from the lessons-learned dept
I had an interesting experience recently with customer service, that seemed worth expanding a bit into a post. On Thursday morning, I noticed that rather than the 200 or so Twitter updates I would see in my regular Twitter client, Tweetdeck, there were only about 15 messages. Something seemed wrong. I checked Twitter (to see if it was down), but it seemed to be showing all of the "missing" messages. I did a search, and lots of others were complaining about missing messages in Tweetdeck as well. I checked Tweetdeck's website and Twitter feed, and neither said anything about problems, so I put up a message on Twitter noting the problems, and wondering if I should check out Seesmic, a Tweetdeck competitor I had tested a long time ago.Here's where things got interesting. There was no response at all from Tweetdeck, but within a few minutes, I actually received a reply from Seesmic. There were two things that struck me as quite interesting about the reply:
- I had directed my original comment at Tweetdeck, but it was the competitor Seesmic that was first to reply. Think about that from a competitive standpoint, and how that changes the way competition can work. In the past, if I had a complaint about one company, it would be more difficult for a competitor to swoop in and offer an alternative. But, with Twitter, it's easy.
- The part that's more impressive. Seesmic didn't slam Tweetdeck, or push me to move to its own product. Instead, it pointed out that the real problem might not have been with Tweetdeck, but with Twitter. In other words, it defended its competitor, and did a better job explaining the problem to me than Tweetdeck itself did.
![Hide This Hide this](https://ii.techdirt.com/s/t/i/topclose.png)
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Filed Under: customer service
Companies: seesmic, tweetdeck, twitter
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
It's a "help the customer in any way you can, if at all possible, and we'll bank on the relationship at some point in the future" strategy. CwF + RtB?
For those who don't know, Zappos sells shoes online, which has nothing to do with taxis.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Twitter problems.
I've been having a lot of problems with Twitter as well. They seem to be having server issues, they can't take the load. I heard just today that it seems to be fixed for some people, but I haven't been able to test it yet.
I've also heard that Twitter got hacked yesterday. The entire website was replaced. Don't know how true that was. May have been part of the problem.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Twitter problems.
Whatever happened to "Customer Service: We're not happy until you're not happy."? ; )
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Twitter problems.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re: Re: Twitter problems.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
1) The font is too small, you can't resize it and my eyes suck.
2) It burns up too much bandwidth. Tweetdeck uses no more than 1 or 2 MB per hour while nearly every other app uses 10-20MB. I have Hughesnet, which has an absurd bandwidth limit. This would put me over that limit.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Dime a Dozen
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Is all good.
I once posted a link to a research paper about ants and the guy came to my blog :)
WTF! Never in a million years I was expecting someone to bother reading what I write and there it was the author of the research paper asking if it was that cool.
Turns out I almost DDoSed his website with the traffic, I had no idea people were reading what I wrote so I never bothered to monitor traffic or read any logs. People flocked to the site and he came looking for the referer LoL
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
jd/adobe
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Hmmm
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Hmmm
True, true. Though, it wouldn't be hard for them to monitor the term "tweetdeck" too.
You know what's disappointing though? It's now been four days, and despite the tweet and this blog post, not a word from Tweetdeck.
I did hear from another competitor as well, though. This does not bode well for Tweetdeck.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
conducting customer support in public - risks and rewards
Interestingly though when I ended up working with HP traditional support they've rather dropped the ball, but Polar have handled the transfer pretty seamlessly.
http://bit.ly/5ryydD
I think as there are more open and public communications channels open with customers the companies that make it are going to be the ones who "get" social media and the fact that it's not just about deflecting a complaint it's about engaging with your existing and potential clients in a much more genuine fashion
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Comment
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Compalint
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Activate Roaming Sim card
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
New Customer Service
This is a great example of real time customer service. Thank to social media website such as Twitter, Facebook and Youtube, now any company is potentially able to answer to any customer's complaints on-line, basically REAL TIME!
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
tanung po .. bkit po pgkatanggap ko po ng load mag te txt na po ako mag se send na ako sa smart sa kaptid ko .. bkit po wla . bkit po bigla akong na check off anu po ba ang ngyayari sa inyo .. hindi lang ngayon ngyari ito ..sna po bigyan nyo po ito ng action ... marami pong salamat .. ASAP ...
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Load grabber
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
smart bro internet connection , ph.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
hi smart
[ link to this | view in chronology ]