It's a formidable challenge to scale your support, especially if your service is free. Twitter's in such a position because, I've had consistently poor experiences with Twitter's lack of support. 4 times now, I've emailed their support, only to wait a week and receive an email that states:
It's been a little while and we haven't been able to get to your request. Twitter is a free service, and while we try to provide as much help as we can, we can't get to every email. Sorry about that! Here are some helpful guidelines to point you toward finding answers to problems.
I understand. But why not send me this as an auto-reply immediately after I enter my original support ticket, to set my expectations and remove false hope of never getting a reply?
It's substantially lacking that Twitter doesn't make prominent usage of trending topics for troubleshooting. For instance, "broken replies", which I'm ailing from right now. This would provide organic visibility which doesn't need to be tediously compiled, and enable Twitter employees to join the conversation more directly — using their own tool!
What a novel idea, huh?
This would be the support equivalent of "Trending Topics" shown on every Twitterer's page. Yes, each of us can make our own list. But doing this would fold steps and make it that more effective.
(It's great that Biz has indeed tweeted about #fixreplies. But take it further, fill the gap.)
Another gap: the Twitter Team is aboard Get Satisfaction, which leverages customer-to-customer help. But they don't list this prominently in their Support Portal; it gets a cursory mention towards the end, even though I've found it more useful than their forums. When something boosts happiness and saves time for both employees and users, it's a go.
2 lessons
- Get your messages out, loud and clear. (Connect, communicate.)
- Empower your customers to share those messages. (They'll amplify your awesome.)
As I like to say: "Many people would gladly spread your words, if only they knew what to say."
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Yeah, can confirm all what you wrote about twitter support (contacted them 4 times, no results…). I can imagine that they are pretty swamped, though there'd be better ways to address this (like you wrote).
Though I'm just experiencing _incredible_ BackType.com support. They are really fast and very responsive. Just wanted to get that word out, since I'm really impressed.
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why I refuse to use Twitter to this day. I mistrust untenable business models.
@Zai I'll let Mike @ BackType know, he's always been grand to me too.
@CyFishy I wonder what our memories of Twitter will be like several years from now.