I’ve recently had two personal experiences of customer service delivered through Twitter - twice in one week.

The detail is below, but in summary:
I now expect brands to respond to me when I tweet about them. Those that do, I like. Those that don’t… they don’t think I’m important enough…so they go down in my estimation.

Experience 1 - Gist

I recently signed up to Gist – a service which aggregates information about all your contacts from different sources (outlook, facebook, twitter, etc) and puts it in one place. Sounds great. After setup, however, I couldn’t log in.

So (not expecting a reply) I tweeted…

They got back to me… 3 times… Initial contact was only 2.5 hours later (read bottom up)

So I @replied, again on Twitter.  And they got back to me again.

I spoke. And they listened. Not only did they listen, they actively engaged me in conversation. They made me feel special. That’s a good thing. I like them. I’ll recommend them. That’s great for them.

Experience 2 - Xmarks

Xmarks is a bookmark synchronising service which syncs your bookmarks between PCs (and Macs) and allows you to share them online too. It’s great.

But I recently had to re-install it (new laptop…old one died)… and it caused a problem.

So I tweeted…(again not expecting a reply)…(and note, didn’t do @xmarks, just a simple xmarks)

3 days later…they got back to me.

OK, so it took 3 days.  But at least they bothered. I’m about to email them.
Both brands above are clearly actively monitoring the social space in order to pro-actively engage with their consumers. And benefiting from my improved perception of them by so doing.

Many brands could learn from these experiences and grow their advocates through social media-enabled customer service.

(Inspired by a tweet from @socialmedia2day…)

Marketing teams spend millions of pounds in manangement time and agency fees developing briefs, tone of voice guidelines, and executions for every single broadcast message they put out. Every comma becomes a trauma, is that wardobe choice dynamic enough, does that font project our innovativeness? And once they’ve fine-tuned these messages and filmed them in glorious technicolour, they seem to sit back, their labours complete, and rest.

We like to think of marketing in human terms (see our previous post on this). I’d like to suggest this behaviour by brands and their owners is the equivalent of me seeing someone across a crowded room, falling in love with them from afar,  going home and crafting a perfect declaration of my love and why I am the ideal person for them, dispatching this missive, then sitting at my open bedroom window, gazing at the stars, sighing wistfully.

The time and resources devoted to enabling relationships between brands and their consumers can still be achingly inadequate. People who make an effort to find a brand and try to engage in conversation often go unrewarded, faced with impersonal automated email systems or glossy brochure websites.

But this can be easy: it certainly doesn’t need to be hard, or even expensive. But it does require a change of mindset, it does require brands to think of their customer relationships more like, well, real relationships; which need to be 2-way, they need maintaining, they need work. Otherwise, they’re not really relationships.