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.