David Fisher : What is Noise Blog

Let’s say you’ve got an online service with millions of users and the service can be used for customer service, and in fact is used for customer service by a growing number of companies. Twitter is a perfect example, and I am going to use them as a small case study for how to NOT handle customer service online.

Background: At some point on August 1, 2008 some users attempted to log into their accounts only to find their accounts deleted for apparently some breach of terms of service. Twitter’s response was less than great and many still cannot access their account.

Here are 12 ways that things should have been done differently

1. Use your own tools: Apparently Twitter themselves don’t track how people feel about them by using the various tools at their disposal. You should use the search.twitter.com (summize) functionality to pay attention to what people are saying about your company. I’ll admit that since it is searching its own service that its a lot harder to search for problems than say “Comcast” but still it should be used. Search for “Fail”, “Bucket” and “Whale” frequently. Have an RSS feed of it going to a Chumby or something.
2. Respond to a problem, don’t ignore it: When many of your major users (@Chrisbrogan and @jeffpulver) message a co-founder and get little to no response, that’s bad. Stay on top of this stuff. If you can’t, then maybe get a virtual assistant. Or forget that Twitter, use that 20.4M and hire a few real ones.
3. Don’t say, “looking into it“: This isn’t really a proper response. It sets no expectation and isn’t anything more than a grunt basically acknowledging that you might take a glance after you finish your beer.
4. Don’t make yourself look bad by Twittering: This is one thing that really pissed me off. Right after I reported the problem I say the top people at Twitter talking about sitting around the office and watching a movie. Then @ev this morning tweets about the wine he’s having. They say Nero played the fiddle/danced while Rome burned. This is way too similar. Don’t do this.
5. If you set up a customer service tool, use it: I put in a request via their “Help Request” section. I also started a thread in their user discussions/support forums. I have had so far 25 responses, but only from other users with problems or offering suggestions. Their customer service people apparently took a vacation for the day.
6. Use your status blog!: There is the status.twitter.com page. Problems affecting an unknown number of users, or more than one user should be reported here and what the status is. This keeps people in the loop and would help control the panic/conversation instead of having people blogging about it, digging it, etc elsewhere.
7. Pay attention to Digg: I’m not a power-digger (ie. I don’t game the system) but when something happens like this I put it on Digg. Twitter should have an RSS feed from Digg of anything that is mentioning Twitter to make sure they are addressing issues like this. If Kevin Rose’s account had been deleted and this front-paged Digg then that would be quite a PR issue for you. Investors don’t like that.
8. Be a little more personal: Don’t just fix the problem. Let people know its actually been resolved, what happened, who to contact for future issues. The response email I got was one step above what you’d expect from a mega-corporation like Microsoft or something.
9. Make sure that the users problems are fully resolved: Don’t just assume that their only problem was the main one that you ‘fixed’. I for example now am following no-one, and thus no one can DM me. Yet I can’t refollow anyone that I had been following before. Freaking weird. And yet, no one asked the simple question, “Can I help you with anything else?” or, “Does that fix everything for you?”. This is customer service 101.
10. Have a freaking customer service phone: I don’t want a call center in India, so don’t give me that, but yet you really should have SOMEONE available to call to check in on these things. Maybe I wouldn’t have that phone number, but at least some people would. At GamerDNA, we put our cell phone numbers on our business cards/email sigs. If there is a fire, we know about it… fast.
11. Don’t fix the problem haphazardly: They fixed my account, but others like @skalik were also affected and weren’t fixed! It’s been over 12 hours. No official response. No emails personally to those affected. No phone calls (people know/can find my number I’m sure). No Status update. Just @Ev kicking back having wine and everyone watching ‘Sneakers’.
12. Use Google Alerts: This will generate a lot of false positives, but use it to keep on top of what people are saying about your company! Duh?

I wish I had something positive to say about Twitter for once. Actually, I do. I’m glad they have a great API so I can use Friendfeed, Pownce, and Ping.FM to push into it instead of actually using just it. That is, when the API works.

The good news is that apparently Twitter really needs a lesson in Social Media customer service, and they’ve got the cash to pay for it. Someone should get on that. I’m thinking a $25K/day rate sounds about right to advise them.

The morale of the story however is this: If you are to be a hub for social media/PR experts, don’t piss on them if you don’t want really bad press.

In the ultimate act of irony, @biz posted to the Twitter blog a plug/link for the TwitterCounter site, which allows you to track the (general growth) of your twitter following. Hours later of course, people aren’t tracking growth but tracking loss due to Moby Dick, the biggest of all fail whales, eating many people’s followers. Twitter’s response is a Douglas Adams like, “Don’t Panic” button saying:

One thing to note: Even after this recovery is complete, your counts may appear lower than previously. In almost all cases, this is not due to missing data. The counts we display on your profile page are not always up-to-date. For example, when we remove spammers from the system (which we’ve been doing a lot lately), the follower counts are not updated in real-time.

Everyone breathed easy for a moment and assumed this to be the case. Those extra 200 or 2,000 followers you had weren’t really followers but just spammers (I didn’t actually know that Twitter was activity pursuing them, which is good to know). If everyone simply lost the “Spam-follower” inflation, whatever. That’s fine. Readjust and move on. Stop claiming that you have 15,000 followers when they are all spammers.

So what everyone did then was check a follower or two of theirs. There was a fast realization that the guy in the office next to you, who certainly wasn’t a spammer with his paltry one update a day, was no longer following you and vice versa. It wasn’t just spammers. It wasn’t just the “count being off”. Something was fucked.

Twitter hadn’t updated the status blog, but @EV (one of the founders of twitter) did tweet, “Okay, maybe it wasn’t just the *count*. But the important thing is: It’s being fixed right now. And we know what happened. Do not panic!”

I don’t know about you, but I’m still panicing. This isn’t good. This isn’t stable. This makes the Middle East look stable. My followers dropped by over 200, many of them people that I know well. What if Facebook just stopped you from being friends with a huge portion of your friends? What if they removed the linking to your girlfriend and made you ’single’? (For some I know this could likely cause them to actually be single due to the silly politics around Facebook relationship status).

So check out the TwitterCounter. Mine shows buckets of fail. Checking some other friends shows oceanloads of fail. We all said EPIC FAILZ before, but now we know the true meaning of it.