I recently had my own experience with a business using Twitter for customer service. I had purchased a domain name with one company, then used Host Gator for my webhost. I was having difficulty synching my e-mail accounts and expressed my frustration with a tweet. Shortly afterwards, I received a reply through Twitter from hostgator addressing my concern and helping me resolve the problem. I didn’t write TO Host Gator, I wasn’t following them, they weren’t following me, but they were running key word searches to read tweets mentioning their company. Their customer service impressed me and I will continue to use their services and recommend them highly to others.
Can you see how this would help businesses? Word of Mouth advertising can make or break a company. Companies can’t always be there when people start talking badly, so they can’t fix the problem. BUT when people tweet complaints, it is to the company’s advantage to catch the comment and try to fix the problem ASAP. There are programs such as Twitter Search (http://search.twitter.com/), Twitscoop (http://www.twitscoop.com/) and Twollo (http://www.twollo.com/) to help make key word searches easier.
Don’t have anyone to keep up with the search? Try hiring a virtual asssitant. 😉 TKM Virtual Services