The Tweet Must Die

Should Twitter trump other customer service channels? Photograph by kanegen.

Deus Ex Machina via Twitter

What do you do when you find $120 in unexpected fees associated with your Allegiant Air ticket? If you’re Vancouver-based marketing professional Paul Marr, you tweet about it until the airline’s customer service department fixes the problem.

Marr’s story was highlighted in a recent MSNBC article, “A Travel Revolution: 6 ways to leverage social media for a better vacation.” The writer singles out the episode as a lesson in how “a kind word can really take you a long way,” after detailing Marr’s experience and noting: “He tried contacting the carrier through normal channels — to no avail — so he sent a friendly message to its Twitter account. Within minutes, his problem was fixed.”

The author’s takeaway: “Travelers with a legitimate grievance used to be powerless to change their fate. Today, anyone with a Twitter account can get immediate satisfaction.”

I’m all for traveler empowerment. But it also raises a bigger question: Should all companies be using Twitter as an instant lifeline to their customer support team?

My measured retort is, no, they should not. In the Allegiant Air case, perhaps the customer service manager thought he or she should play hero after Marr got a week’s runaround. But if your customer service department is well organized and well run, trumping normal procedures by privileging tweets will just break carefully designed procedures, not to mention anger your non-tweeting customers.

The Scarlet T

Furthermore, in the case of this airline, the eventual response to Marr’s tweet looks suspiciously like a Band-Aid on substandard customer service practices. Just review Marr’s Twitter feed for the relevant postings:

• June 10 (3:41pm): Heavily anticipating a customer service (return) call from @allegiantair
• June 10 (5:26pm): 50 minutes before the promise that I would hear from a customer service manager @allegiantair is broken. . . .
• June 16 (12:04pm): … Btw, @allegiantair ‘s customer service manager still hasn’t called me.
• June 16 (3:26pm): Need an airline that offers great deals and listens on Twitter? @allegiantair called me within 30 mins of my last post. Grt cstmr service!

“Grt cstmr service,” really? Yes, Marr got his money back—happy day—but first he had to tweet multiple times, in essence using the specter of a public shaming to get a manager to respond. Even for airlines, which are notorious for shirking their responsibility for travel delays and never answering lost-luggage hotlines, doesn’t this seem sloppy?

Customer Service and Twitter

Of course, this doesn’t mean you should ignore Twitter. In fact, just like phone, IM, and email, you can easily integrate Twitter into your contact center’s multimedia queue. But please, please don’t jump on the bandwagon of privileging tweets—or any other customer interaction channel, for that matter—and especially don’t create a team just dedicated to Twitter users. Because all you’re going to do is encourage bad behavior, and make life difficult for the rest of us waiting in the call center queue for a customer service rep to solve our service issues.

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Innoveer helps organizations assess their existing social CRM strategy, sales, marketing, service, and collaboration capabilities. Contact us to learn more about Innoveer’s Social Business Framework, based on the best practices of hundreds of CRM practitioners, which we use to help businesses rapidly develop a social CRM adoption strategy.