IVR systems get no respect.
An IVR could be considered a great addition to a call center. It handles all incoming calls, resolves the simple requests for service through interactive applications, routes the calls to the most appropriate agent, and captures identifying information to pass along . Is the perfect attendant and can scale to hundreds of simultaneous incoming calls.
It should be considered a success story. Users don’t want to use it.
When first introduced – only functioning as a phone-tree with routing functions – people liked the novelty of it. The novelty wore off and the system showed its true colors: an automated routing mechanism with little forethought put into at deployment time, no integration or interactive abilities, and few tales of success.
Vendors quickly began to improve their offerings, create better programming interfaces, provide more interactive functions and add voice recognition. Today is far better than it was initially, and is actually useful to automatically solve around 30% of the calls.
Twitter is moving along the same path.
I referenced in the past the problems with Twitter and how you should only consider it another channel for customer service. Research showed companies used it mostly as an escalation tool to the call center, or to create tickets; few cases are solved via Twitter. It is closely related to the IVR. Focus on what Twitter can do well and stop thinking that it can do more than it can.
We will see innovations for the use of Twitter in Customer Service that will make it a better tool. For now, use it as you use your IVR: automating large volume of interactions, routing and creating tickets, and provide a listening ear for feedback.
Anything else, simply cannot be done now. Do you agree?
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I agree for now.. But there is more:
Twitter can be seen and compared with an IVR and maybe even managed like an IVR. But there are more differences than similarities
The first difference is that Twitter does not feel like an intelligent system. Its success is based on the fact that it feels like human-to-human interaction and engagement. And that’s actually what it is.
Second, it requires less effort from the customer. Customers can just tweet the name of the company and immediately the companies ears are tuned to the person. The ball is now in the companies court. With an IVR it is still the Customer who has to make the choices, with tweets its the company that has to make the choices (do I engage or not? do I redirect to other channels? etc).
Thirdly, as you point out: all the great intelligence built in IVR’s these days are not (yet) available for Twitter. This makes routing to the right skills (in high volumes) a great challenge for Twitterservice.
Last, maybe most important difference: the main drivers (for companies) to use IVR’s is to avoid human-call handling for easy questions and requests (costs) as well as to direct customers to people with the right skill-set to deal with the customer request. The main drivers to use Twitter are improvement of the customer (brand) experience (by showing you are listening and engaging when necessary) as well as collecting WOM and Feedback.
With so many differences I’m hesitating to say Twitter and the IVR are closely related. And if they are not, in their essence, related, what does this mean for future innovations?
Will we ever have the intelligence in tweet-routing as we have it in the IVR? Will we ever be able to automate high-volume tweet-answering. And if we do, will we loose the personal engagement touch there currently is in Twitterservice? Will that not mean the end of Twitter as a Customer Service channel?
My conclusion (for now):
I think Twitterservice in relative low volumes (as I think it is now with most companies active in this area) stands a good chance to do the tasks you described (and not more).
When Twitterservice becomes a high volume channel, it will become non-personal through automated responses or re-directions to other channels, with no added value over other channels.
If it does not become that, it will be only for those companies that allow themselves to spend a fortune on Twitterservice, because it will be very labour-intensive.
My question to you: Would it not be best, If a business runs a high volume service center right now, and they do not want to ruin the customer (brand)experience on Twitter in the future (when the masses discover the twexperience on low volumes), to just stay out of the Twitterservice at all, and only use it as a listening ear for feedback?
[...] This post was Twitted by wimrampen [...]
Great comments Wim. I tend to agree as I view Twitter as more of a megaphone to announce your problems to the world whereas the IVR is simply a 2 way walkie talkie with only one person listening on the other end (public vs private).
The problem that many people face is they see new tools as merely extensions of past tools and often try to use them the same. Twitter, and tools like it, are much different than IVRs and should be leveraged in much different ways.
- Twitter enables mass problem solving, not limited to one company to one user. Leverage it by building a trained and passionate community of expert followers.
- Twitter responses should absolutely be automated, to a point. If someone complains about voice quality on their VOIP system then an automated response should be tweeted to the user with a link to a simple trouble shooting page. The conversation should flow to the best tool to solve the problem which will often mean leaving Twitter altogether.
I am curious to see what others think as well, great topic.
John
[...] For Questions on Twitter in Customer Service, Press 1 (ekolsky.wordpress.com) [...]
Esteban,
Good post and discussion.
From the customer’s perspective, there seem to be very few positive IVR experiences. It is mostly an inefficient source of frustration.
TwitterService carries with it the opportunity at this point to interact with a person with very little time or effort involved.
To Wim’s point, this is probably a novelty at this point – but more and more people are looking to Twitter to be supported.
Some companies are doing a great job of listening and engaging. Most still aren’t in the game, or to Esteban’s point are beginning to duplicate their mistakes all over.
Best regards,
Brian
We’re thinking along the same lines. I just wrote about twitter as a source for text mining “customer experience” data, and while it’s a useful signal for spiking customer service issues when analyzed, the low volume, lack of representative sampling, lack of inherent customer data in the tweet, and requirement for direct customer/company interaction makes it less transformational than all the hype might suggest, and more just an incremental way to do support.
I believe that companies should focus on more direct customer feedback for intelligence/analysis purposes.
If they can have a conversation with a tweeter, and identify the customer’s specific issues, provide diagnosis, resolution, etc via twitter, fine, but from a customer experience analytics perspective, we find at Clarabridge that companies gain far more insight and value” from call centers, survey feedback, and more interactive social media outlets such as forums, newsgroups, and review sites.
Excellent conversation here!
I have learnt so much & got so many perspectives here! Having faced an IVR only as a customer I do not have rave feedback on them. 
Though as a developer who dabbled into their basics way back in 2001-2 I was enthused with the opportunities to build so many useful stuff that would alleviate my pains as a customer, the technology itself did not deliver. I unfortunately got into BPM & couldn’t get into IVR development.
Have any of you looked at any IRC based support channels? Admitted its used by geeks, but its a model that can be modeled on Twitter too! They have bots answering FAQs as well as developers & experts (community of power users) answering other queries or routing to resources on the web.
Look at Ubuntu IRC channels, it will give you a very good idea of what am talking about.
Forgot to mention one caveat with IRC though … I guess Canonical guys did not consider the common man who would not know how to use IRC … so while their IRC channel has great model for customer service, its reach is limited. They are not on twitter, though identi.ca has a !ubuntu room where the community responds back to you. But again identi.ca is a geek’s arena. Twitter though more popular than identi.ca doubt if it too represents the most popular channel of the target market segment.
As a marketer, I absolutely love the idea of Twitter for customer service. I wish all my COMPETITORS would use it. That way I can find out what is wrong with their products, I can see how they respond to very public cries for help, I can spot likely high-value customers who are at risk of defection and I have a tailor-made ambush marketing channel to capture them too.
Thank you Twitter.
Graham Hill
Customer-centric Innovator
I think that the comparison of Twitter to IVR you are making is incomplete. True, if you think of Twitter as a tool or medium for facilitating conversation between two parties, the company and the customer, I agree that it will quickly run into the same issues as other service options and require automation inserted between the customer and company in order to make it scalable and cost-effective.
However, that tends to miss the real value of social services like Twitter: it’s not about providing another way to connect the company and the customer, its about connecting the customer to other customers who can respond on the company’s behalf. Why force the customer to talk to a robot (no matter how well programmed) when you can help them talk to a volunteer expert who can provide more solutions than even the most sophisticated self-help systems, and the emotional satisfaction that a computer program never could. That a company can identify power users and advocates, and facilitate their interactions with the company’s other customers through a channel like Twitter is the real promise social tools have. With a community of volunteers you can achieve economies of scale that previously could only be accomplished through automation, but without any loss in perceived value by the customer – in fact, they often value the help they receive more when it comes from their peers.
However, I don’t think Twitter alone is sufficient to make all that happen – more for your points about the 140 character limits and the lack of depth and memory that you cite in the comments and in your previous article. But it is a mistake to think of the tool in terms of 1 to 1 communications that can only be made efficient through automation. Twitter IS well-suited to connect many people together on almost any topic, and this is where the possibilities lie. Twitter by itself may not be enough for real support, but making Twitter more like an IVR is not going to make it better, it will only make it as limited as IVRs currently are.
Great discussion, Esteban. I agree with most of what’s been said and wanted to shed light from the Customer Experience Analytics side of things.
As far as Twitter or any other social media channel is concerned, it’s just that – another way to interact with your customers. And if there’s a way to log it and track it properly you can then integrate it into the complete cross-channel view of your customer experience. Was Twitter the last resort? Did this customer try the website first, then the IVR and only then decided to openly voice his frustrations for everyone (including your competition) to see? Are you aware that the way you respond to this tweet might be viewable to everyone?
There obviously a lot to take into account when analyzing this new form of customer interaction. I don’t believe it’s mature enough just yet, but with new developments by several companies (CoTweet had some good news yesterday) it will eventually grow into something that really can’t be ignored.
IVR is a slam dunk. Route people to the right resources, let them self-serve if they want to, let them speak to a live person at any point in the experience, etc. Social media channels are a little tougher to gauge. How do you get notified? Is it reliable enough? And of course, there’s the whole issue of information security.
I’m very excited to see how all this develops. Thanks for the great topic.
Great discussion!
I agree to an extent. I’m a fan of using Twitter for customer service; I’ve written about it a few times, myself:
But you’re right–Twitter won’t replace your existing IVR or any other type of service. Instead, we need to look to expanding our service options horizontally. Some folks want to call on the phone, so let’s improve the IVR. Some want an instant Twitter response they can rave/complain about after, so let’s monitor social media channels. Some want to meet us at trade shows.
You get the idea. Customer service is about using all available channels to serve and reach out to our customers.
Esteban,
A great conversation with many different facets and perspectives. If you don’t mind, I would quite like to bring another angle in and compare Twitter to an outbound voice dialer – this was prompted by the megaphone comment which which amused me and actually prompted me to comment on your blog.
My simple point is that rather than considering Twitter to be like an IVR; which as you correctly point out are generally poorly implemented and not liked by customers. I think you could also consider it to be like an outbound voice dialer providing notifications to your customers.
Now I realise that these things are generally not liked by customers since they are essentially an intrusion or there is nobody there to field the call when they dialer calls you. However, given the broadcast SMS nature of Twitter and the fact it is non-invasive in the way that a dialer just isn’t – Twitter is never going to interrupt the TV for example then there are merits to be had in thinking about it in this way.
The other thing to consider here, is that if you are a company with a Twitter presence then you are opting in to what that company has to say. Therefore, one could argue that you are reaching high value customers simply by virtue of the fact that they must be loyal to your company in brand to follow you in the first place.
Personally, I quite like the 140 character limit, it makes people be more concise which in a world where there is a lot to be said and time is precious is quite welcome.
Cheers
Mark
[...] For Questions on Twitter in Customer Service, Press 1 (ekolsky.wordpress.com) [...]
[...] For Questions on Twitter in Customer Service, Press 1 (ekolsky.wordpress.com) [...]
[...] For Questions on Twitter in Customer Service, Press 1 (ekolsky.wordpress.com) [...]
[...] For Questions on Twitter in Customer Service, Press 1 (ekolsky.wordpress.com) [...]
Esteban-
Twitter is a good place for IVR systems, both for customer service and marketing. I think Wim was accurate when mentioning that, at scale the customer experience will require automation. I don’t agree with Wim that once the automation is in place Twitter as a channel won’t have advantages over other channels. The light-weight experience is my first choice for “most” customer service and as tools are developed to enhance that experience this sentiment will grow. Yes, we build those tools.
Brands won’t have the option of just listening. As Esteban keeps pointing out marketing should be the primary focus for most brands on Twitter. It won’t be well received to market without listening over a channel that is two-way.
Dave
Dave,
I am actually very curious at this point to see where twitter will go in the future with versions and functions before committing to it full time. We all know it has flaws, but if they are fixed they could be riding the wave for a long time. If not, or not fixed on time, I will be curious to see what happens.
Thanks
Esteban
Wim,
Thanks for bringing the conversation over here. I also thank for putting the time to give me your thoughts, I am going to love this conversation!
First, yes – you are right. It does feel like human interaction — for now. I am basing this on previous experiences, but as we continue to grow the use of Twitter we are bound to start making it more “automated” (it is part of the automation), and then we can have the conversation. When email and chat, even SMS, first started they were all personalized channels and 1:1 communication. I don’t have all the details, but I am working a model for pricing Twitter interactions (shocking, I know, that there is a cost associated with it) on a similar manner that we used for email and chat and SMS. Remember, in those channels we were not able to lower the costs per transactions until we automated — and I am close to saying that the same applies to this. Don’t have all the details yet – but will soon. So, as we begin to automate (which is bound to be easier with Twitter due to the interfaces and APIs that exist) then we can have this conversation again.
Even then, I was not trying to compare them at that level (interface and look-and-feel) but at the channel-to-channel level. But you do make a good point.
Second, you make an excellent point and I have not much more to add. It is about the company engaging and that is a great point. I could make the comparison that with IVR the company had to make the choice of what they wanted to do – a good job or an easy one (another coming post), and they almost always chose the easy one. However, even if things were better in IVR world, it is the choice of the customer versus the choice of the company. Thanks for that. I a going to have to think more about that as I work my engagement model (third post of the future).
Third, yes. That was kinda the core of the post – we are not there yet, but we should prepare so we can make better use of the tools as they become available.
Lastly (I will call it fourth since I have a couple more things to comment on your later paragraphs), here i am going to differ a little bit from what you said. I see the value of Twitter mostly as collecting feedback and marketing at this time. The posts I put on this blog go into more details, but solving problems 140-chars at the time comes in very, very hard to do over time. There is totally a possibility for Twitter to become similar to IVR for the web. Same as chat-bots could’ve done, but never grabbed the opp. I did some research some time back and concluded that 40-50% of web interactions and chat interaction could have been solved via a chat-bot interface without much problem. Can you calculate the savings? The total saved would have been amazing for most organizations. Chat-bots did not manage to deliver on that (some good implementations are claiming close to 30% FCR), but twitter totally can — if they make it part of a large enterprise-wide multi-channel management. I still see Twitter becoming sophisticated and integrated enough to do in a short- to mid-term. And I would totally welcome it.
Imagine if you can an automated Twitter reader system that differentiates between feedback, complaints, and questions and handles each per business rules that we use for other channels today (of course, call center comes to mind). that is what I envision for Twitter in the mid-term — as close as 2 years from now.
I totally agree with your conclusions and questions, excellent points you make. I don’t think, however, that the progress of Twitterservice is tied to innovation and progress in customer service. Remember that Twitter was never designed or thought to be used for customer service. What we are doing now is like babies that found a battery-operated talking doll. Once we figured what we can do with it, we will push the tummy (or hand, or whatever) a million times until we eventually get tired of seeing nothing more come of it. Then we will leave it behind, drooled-on, mangled, and in bad shape to move to the next shiny, noisy thing we find. Which, more than likely, will be an iteration of Twitter of sorts that will be more closely related to service (like chat-bots are an innovation of KM and Chat mostly related to customer service, or IVR is an adaption of other technologies mostly geared to customer service).
As to the answer to your question — two parts to that. first, the people who are going to be using twitter for service today are leaders and advanced users of technology. they are the ones that don’t expect an amazing experience and know it is in its infancy. it is always the same with any technology – leaders and advanced users don’t care much about the initial state. By the time my mom comes to twitter to get customer service (many, many, many years in the future) or my wife (a few years less) the experience is going to be so different from today’s that your question will not matter much. However, Twitter must be part of a strategy to be deployed — even now — or it has not change of succeeding.
Second, I always endorse Twitter for Feedback and Marketing over any other functions. I think I started this answer along those lines. Therefore, I am going to answer your question with the following statement:
“As long as twitter fits in your customer service strategy, and you understand what you can get and provide to it right now, then go ahead and do it now. Else, use it for feedback only and wait for the right opportunity to engage in service transactions”.
My emphasis will continue to be on feedback and marketing…
John,
Nice comments. Now, get a hold of something. Ready?
I agree with what you say.
Ninety-five percent of it at least. I swear.
Automation, check. Extension and repeatability, check. Leaving twitter for solutions, check.
Twitter as a community — not check.
I wrote about this before, how Twitter is a cacophonic commune with no like-minded members — but members that tend to aggregate with a common interest, there is no knowledge management, storage, or ability to share more than a passing thought – and it is almost impossible to find it later (ask me how long it took me to collect that 3-4 page PDF of the NPS discussion last time). that makes for a great commune, good experience in the moment with shared interests but no long-term value — almost. I think that if we integrate twitter with a KM systems, good policies for creating and sharing content, and storage potential – then we can turn twitter into a community. but 140-chars in real time do not make a community.
You can turn the commune (or a collective) into a community by adding features and extracting value out of it — as it stands, you may at best get some instant value out of it, but not much more.
Brian,
I am going to disagree with you on IVR – a little. True, most of the setups are so poorly done that you are right, customers are frustrated and don’t want to use it. Alas, in the last few months we are seeing some implementations that make sense (few, to be honest – fewer that I care to admit) and that gives me hope. I think that technology advanced enough that smart organizations are taking another look at it. Come on, the cost of an IVR interaction (average) is around a-buck-fitfy… that is like one fifth the cost of most other interactions. If, as when done well, IVR can take 40%-60% of interactions away from the call center– can you calculate the savings? As I said, the technology is there now — we just need to bring people around to understand better how to use it.
I agree wholeheartedly with you on one thing… most companies are not on board, nor even ready to take the dip into the pool. And, those are the ones I want to target before the charlatans make them jump in the wrong end of the pool and drown.
Sid,
Here is something amazing. I was dong email tonight before coming to do comments on the blog and I noticed you follow me on Twitter (thanks, btw). I went to check out your blog since I always do that for everyone before committing to follow-back, your profile, google-you, etc. You know, the whole routine. And I was impressed by what you have to offer — so I followed you back, of course, and RSS your blog via google. Yes, I like what you have to say that much
The part I like the best: I had not found before you another person that says that same I do — when doing feedback, unstructured feedback is where the value comes from. I am glad you are at Clarabridge (did push some people in your direction in the past, good product and implementation), and with that thought process. Maybe we shoudl’ve met back in the days when I was running EFM at Gartner
As for your comment, I think you re mostly correct. Twitter suffers from lack of depth and memory, which makes it a good tool to collect feedback on, not to have interactive-interactions for support. I think it wil play a role in the future, but not as much as people expect it. Whoever-happens-to-be-the-next-Twitter will be much more influential on customer service, and feedback, than this tool. Alas, as a trail-blazer, we could do much more worse — and not that much better.
Thanks for the read and comments.
Prem,
Thanks for a great comment. I wonder how long you have been saving that one?
Just kidding, I think it is a great comparison, really.
I used to use IRC back in the days when — well, we are not going to go into details of what I did back then, most of it was mostly legal anyways.
The point is that I do remember it quite well and I think it is a great comparison (size restrictions aside) as to how this channel and that one are similar.
I think that the part that is most interesting from what you said is the limited reach. We tend to forget that Twitter is till very early adopter stuff, limited adoption, not even close to critical mass.
However, i think this is is the best time to try to provide direction and input into this market. If we do a good job now and come up with the best practices, the good solutions, the way to do it we can cut the time to adoption and increase the number of people who like it and use it.
That is why I spend time researching and thinking about this…
Thanks for the great reference, and the trip down memory lane.
Graham,
That is a great comment. And something that I started to notice happening. Most people who use tools to track twitter were just doing egocentric searches, but lately have been going the other way.
I even read a couple of cases about companies that changed customers from going with a specific vendor in favor of another just by doing twitter well (no, not spamming back, just having the conversation that the original vendor did not have with its customers).
I think that the key here is to level the playing field, to make sure you participate at the same level as your competitors — even more. Then we are back to being able to just be yourself supporting an additional channel.
Great, great comment. Thanks a lot…
Its an awesome concept Graham, one that is sure to work well! But are we solely relying on the failure of our competition for our success? I would consider this as one of the additional benefits/byproduct of the twitter channel. Would like to know your thoughts.
Scott,
Thanks for stopping by.
I see where you are coming from in your comment and I would agree except for two things: Twitter makes for a lousy (IMO) many-many tool. Someone else mentioned Twitter being a megaphone (there is also a fairly funny video showing Twitter in real-life that talks to the same idea). Imagine people with megaphones yelling at each other. Yeah, that is kinda like many-many twitter conversations — we all have megaphones and we are yelling at each other at the same time. In short outbursts. Not the best way to commnicate.
A platform like yours, Lithium, is much more conducive to a many-many communication, has no limitations on space, has memory and storage, and it can probably easy interface with Twitter as a starting point for a conversation. Someone gets on the megaphone to ask a question, and is then invited into a community to have a conversation. This is similar to what we have today with many of the other channels we use for customer service and escalation. I think ultimately the-tool-that-will-replace Twitter will become better at doing that, automatically escalate and route to the best channel based on your needs. Twitter may even be able to grow into that, but it will need some changes and additional tools.
I see a potential for Twitter to become that entry point to a community, but not in its current state. Communities that exist without a memory and storage are too ephemeral to have a long-term value.
Keep coming back as I will continue to expand, my view, and we continue to have conversations on where we go with communities. It is going to be the next next thing for us i reckon.
Thanks for the in-depth response Esteban, I really appreciate the conversation here – lots of great discussion! Which I suppose tends to prove one of failings of Twitter in its inability to sustain involved discussions such as this.
I’ve seen that megaphone video too, it is pretty funny and does point out the absurdities of having those conversations in real life. But I think that metaphor falls down when you realize that the conversations going on within Twitter are being recorded. While there is a lot of noise on Twitter, it is possible to focus your attention on what you want to find. To extend the metaphor above, it is like recording all the sounds of people shouting with megaphones, and then using a sophisticated voice recognition tool to parse out each person’s words and provide ways to search and sort them – all in real time.
But no argument at all that we are still in early days. Twitter itself may or may not evolve into the tool we need. But it’s potential as a connector of disparate groups of people is an important one, and one that later tools will do well to build on. Returning to what I said earlier in this comment, we may not have been able to have this discussion on Twitter, but is was through Twitter that I first found this conversation. In that respect I would agree that Twitter is a great routing tool like an IVR. But unlike IVRs, it’s not about automating company interactions with individuals, its about facilitating the company’s reach through its advocates to achieve the necessary benefits of scale.
Thanks again for bringing up this topic for discussion! It is certainly time we looked past the novelty factor of these tools and find out if and how we can use them to actually improve how we do business. Looking forward to finding out where this leads us next!
Amir,
Thanks for stopping by. I appreciate your contribution from the side of CEA — always an interesting perspective.
You bring an excellent point which I had advocated for in the past, but not yet in the Twitter world – cross-channel measurement and analysis. This is, in my opinion, the last frontier for multi-channel. Integrating biz rules or KM across channels is doable, not easy – but doable. So far, measuring channel-hopping customers or transactions that cross channels is not easy to do – actually, make that not done. I got so tired of being asked this question and have no answer while I was at Gartner that I ended up telling my customers to go ask their vendors why they were not giving them (and us) any information on it. It was not a welcome answer, but the only I could give at the time. My customers thought I did not know the answer, but the true is that still today (for the most part) ther eis no answer — or the answer is not what customers want (one vendor that does it all in 2-3 months and works forever without changes).
A key concept in feedback management is that if you don’t do it well, as in following each interaction mostly, by the time you capture the feedback is probably too late to act. How many times a customer said ‘oh, now you care?” when we reach out to them?
But I digress, I can talk about that forever
back to Twitter. I cannot wait to see the developments and as I said above: I think that the key to using Twitter is going to be avoiding the problems and errors we made before – and that was the spirit of this blog.
Thanks for bringing a new dimension to the discussion.
You are making an excellent point. When we first started with — well, any other channel, we just had the raw channel (kinda like Twitter now), and we slowly figured out how to make it work better. We figured out how to filter information, how to find a better way to use it, and what were the necessary tools to make it work better.
My POV on Twitter is that today does not have what it needs, and tomorrow it may — or Twitter2.0 may (whatever that product ends up being). It is up to us to point the direction based on our experiences in other channels, other situations, and to blaze the trail on the best way to do this in customer service. I honestly believe that if we do that we can shorten the transit through the trough of dissillusionment (Gartner’s Hype Cycle) and the fasten the slow climb up the slope of enlightment. That is the purpsoe of this conversation, IMHO.
If the people who read / participate in this community are the ones who are going to move Twitter adoption forward (and I do believe we are), then we have to be focused on what we need to do. We know, at least I hope we do, what Twitter is good for and how to do it well (at least for where we are in time with Twitter) and what is missing. That is the best way to move forward: either fill-in what’s missing or avoid the traps and focus on delivering value with what we can today.
Tomorrow is different and someone else will probably bring about the solution… I am just one more cog in the community doing what i can to advance SCRM.
Heidi,
Exactly. It is not about losing focus of the end-results (providing the answer) but rather focus on the means (better channels, better integration) to get there.
I just have one question for you: how do you ensure that all channels deliver the same experience at the end? Do you focus on all channels regardless or the best channel for each transaction? How do you make those decisions and implement those experiences?
That is what I think is missing in Twitter, and that is what I’d love to hear from the people reading / commenting here. How to make it happen?
Mark,
Interesting point. Makes me think (which will continue after this reply is done). I always said that Twitter is best used for ears and mouth (listen to feedback, market your content and value to your community). I never thought of it as an announcement tool overall for — well, everything. There are a couple of recorded events where (Stanley cup playoffs, an outage on a cable TV provider was known via twitter and word spread before other channels were even notified) this has happened, but I cannot recall or know of any time when the organization actually used it in that manner. I know there is some investigation going on as far as using it as a reverse-911 by local governments (instead of calling everyone by phone, one-by-one, use Twitter to reach out to people).
I am somewhat concerned by the real-time nature and lack of ‘importance’ that the channel provides (in other words, you either get it when it is announced, or you miss if). Sure, it can be repeated constantly, but the people who heard it once may disengage and miss the rest of the updates.
In any case, you bring an interesting point and I will think about it… thanks for that!
(and thanks for the read, and RT)