Comcast and a Customer Service Revolution?
With all the controversy and suckness coming from Comcast’s general direction, who would have thought that they would be leading the way in a customer service (r)evolution. Comcast has a man on the inside. Frank Eliason a.k.a. @comcastcares is a Comcast Customer Service Rep that scouts out tweeted complaints, proactively contacts the customer, then works to resolve the issue! He helps with customers’ problems all day long including one for Mike Arrington of TechCrunch and John C. Dvorak. The idea is simple, keep an ear to the ground, and help people out. Tweet Scan makes keeping an ear out trivial. You can use it search in real time for Twitter posts containing your brand name. It also offers RSS for your search! Allowing you to be notified immediately whenever somebody comments on your company. You are literally listening to 1,032,665 (as shown on TwitDir) users simultaneously for any mention of your name. Now THAT is a killer app! So, you’ve found the people with issues, now all you have to do is have one of your trained representatives fix the problem. If it’s so easy why is Comcast the only Fortune 500 company doing this? After all, searching out people who are having problems and fixing them not only saves you money and builds strong customer relationships but is also great for press! The truth is, most Fortune 500 companies are too slow moving to jump on an opportunity like this, but that doesn’t mean that you should be. Every company (and many individuals) should at least have some sort of rudimentary system in place to keep a finger on the pulse of what is being said about them on the internet (we will be talking about this in future posts). It could be as simple as a Tweet Scan or Technorati RSS feed for brand name. You can then use this information for customer service (as in our Comcast case), monitoring general feelings about your brand, engaging customers, cultivating new ideas or strategies, maybe just for vanity, etc, etc, etc. Twitter may or may not be just another flavor of the month, but it poses some interesting opportunities. Its question “What are you doing right now”, lends itself to high volume use and open, off-the-cuff insight into users’ thoughts and feelings. I think Comcast has started the trend. It shouldn’t be long before other companies who share a demographic with Twitter are jumping on board. Think Apple and Dell. And what about unrelated brands with famously good customer service? Think Cadillac, Four Seasons Hotels, Nordstrom. It shouldn’t be long now. Every company needs to actively manage their brand online.
So here’s my question for you: How do you manage your presence online? What companies have you seen do an outstanding job? Where do you see this movement going?
Last 3 posts by Justin Thiele
- Filtrbox for Monitoring Your Brand on the Web - August 18th, 2008
- Name This: The Crowdsourced Naming Agency - August 1st, 2008
- Yahoo! Pipes for Fun and Profit! - June 9th, 2008
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