Last night, Twitter was featured on ABC World News with Charles Gibson. The piece talked about Comcast performing acts of customer service magic by watching the Web for signs of disgruntled customers and then acting as digital detectives to help solve those problems. The report went on to say how companies like Dell, JetBlue, Southwest Airlines and Kodak were all on Twitter "aggressively protecting their brand, often giving those who complain amazing service."
Watching search.twitter.com (formerly Summize) in the minutes that followed the ABC report showed a flood of new Twitter users signing up with expectations of their customer service woes being heard. Here are some examples of first tweets, all of which used the tell-tale generic avatar of a newbie:
With expectations like those, it's hard not to be disappointed. And if all of those concerns are not addressed, as Tracy Wilson Tracey Lee Wallace's were in the report, then in the eyes of those customers, the brands mentioned have failed them again.
I feel sorry for Comcast. Their ten "digital detectives" are going to be very busy keeping up with the new complaints channel. But, thankfully there is a (mostly) reliable search engine, because you can be almost certain these new Twitter users won't know that they'll be seen faster by using @comcastcares.
UPDATE 07/22/08: A manual search in search.twitter.com conducted 6 hours after the piece aired in the East, revealed more than 100 Tweets attributed to new users as a direct result of the ABC report. This does not account for new users who have signed up and not yet posted or have made their updates private (which, in itself presents a customer service issue for companies on Twitter who won't see those tweets). In the search, I discovered a tweet from none other than Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter welcoming the new users. And to their credit, despite the reservations of users, Twitter did not go down as a result of the coverage.
UPDATE 07/23/08: There have been some interesting comments left on the ABC site about this story.
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