These days, if you want attentive customer service from most companies, the most direct route is to complain about the company on Twitter in such a way that your tweet shows up in the company’s mentions. It doesn’t matter whether your cable is working poorly, you had problems rebooking a flight, or your iPhone app didn’t work as well as you expected, Twitter is the place to seek relief.
This is a problem, mostly for the companies people are complaining about. They’re teaching their customers that the only way to get responsive customer service is to embarrass them publicly. What these companies fear most is that a complaint on Twitter will inspire an avalanche of “me too” retweets and responses that ultimately has a measurable negative impact on their business. That gives every customer who happens to be on Twitter the opportunity to be an amateur extortionist.
Here’s the thing, though. I don’t want to have to threaten a company to get decent customer service. If that’s what it takes, I don’t want to do business with the company at all. This is on my mind, of course, because there’s a company out there that I am having a bad customer service experience with, and I’m frustrated by the fact that griping about it on Twitter would almost certainly make it better.
What I’ve done instead is look at the company’s replies on Twitter to see what they suggest to other people who go to Twitter with their complaints, and follow those instructions. We’ll see how it works out.