A Tale Of Modern-Day Customer Support

In the old days, if you had a problem with a product and wanted to deal with it online, you could email the company’s customer support or post a question in their online support forum, if they had one. Questions and problems, if the company even responded, were often dealt with in private rather than on an open forum. Today, there’s Twitter and Get Satisfaction instead, because there’s nothing like a bright public light shone on a company’s product to make them take notice.

If you’re not familiar with Get Satisfaction, it’s a site used for providing customer support in an open forum: it’s independent from the companies represented there, although employees of a company can choose to participate. You can open a new topic or participate in an existing topic, and you may have your issue resolved by a participating company employee or by someone else in the community. It’s a great open model for customer support: the conversation is completely transparent, and controlled by the community rather than the company that is the target of the discussion.

Back to the story: I’ve been searching for a new place to live, and receive daily reports from my real estate agent of properties that fit my criteria. Some of these include a link to a virtual tour of the property, and the most popular virtual tour site (at least for listings in Toronto) is Obeo. One problem that I have with Obeo is that it resizes my browser window — a clear breach of good web design when your site might be sharing that window with several other open tabs — and I tweeted my frustration at it about two weeks ago, then forgot about it. On Twitter, however, someone is always listening, and yesterday Get Satisfaction tweeted back that a thread had been opened based on my tweet.

As it turns out, Get Satisfaction has an “overheard” section for each company on the site that shows all tweets that mention the company name, and anyone can start a new topic based on one of those tweets. When that happens, the original twitterer receives an @reply that someone has replied to their tweet on Get Satisfaction.

So this is the new model for customer service: totally transparent, community-driven, involving multiple online channels including micro-blogging and independent community forums. You’d better be ready for it, because your customers no longer need your permission to talk about you.