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.

I was on Twitter a bit ago and something was acting funny. I couldn’t see what I had updated under, “What you’re currently doing” or whatever it says. I figured to move on and go back to my work. Just another Twitter bug. Then I go to the Twitter page again about 20 minutes later to find that I’m logged out. Odd, I try to log back in. Then I find that my account has been deleted! I go to restore my account to find that they cannot find my email address. My account is @tibbon.

I am not a spammer. I have a .8/1 following/follower ratio. I don’t pimp products on there. I don’t overuse (or even use) their API, asides from my blog posting links there. I haven’t posted anything offensive. Nothing about my account makes me look like a spammer or someone that should be deleted.

My password I don’t think is guessable/hackable, but I’ll take that as a possibility. It’s kinda longish and alphanumeric. I’m kinda hoping this is what happened.

The other week, Twitter having the massive problems and temporarily losing users was pretty bad… but now randomly (seemingly) deleting users accounts? That’s just low!

I’ve posted a topic to their customer service forum here and put in a issue ticket. Needless to say, I’m fairly pissed, even if its a temporary bug/misunderstanding. I should have at least gotten an email from them about it. I just created the account @unbanTibbon. I’ll be on there until things are normal. I also pushed out a Digg story about this, just so more people will see it (and someone hopefully help since Twitter has no phone number for customer-support).

UPDATE #1, 8:46pm: Instead of trying to request un-deletion with my email address, I tried my username and got the notice, “This account has been suspended due to violations of the Terms of Service. If you have questions, please contact customer support.” Definitely not a mistake. Definitely uncool. Sigh.

Step 1) Have great idea. Step 2) ????. Step 3) Profit! Apparently someone didn’t tell Twitter that Step 2 is “don’t fuck it up“. Twitter’s lack of stability and massive downtime lately has been pretty horrid. Rumors that they’ve gotten another 15M in funding are swirling around, but also rumors of technical incompetence there abound. Unlike somewhere such as 37Signals (or betahouse) they don’t have programming rockstars working for them it seems.

Yes, twitter has unique problems. They will require unique solutions. Until someone figures them out however, I think I’m going to back off using/caring about twitter. This is really sad. In the past year I’ve learned to love twitter. Yet, nonstop slowdowns, client bugs, downtime, etc have kinda killed it for me.

Maybe their goal and monetization plan is to get everyone hooked, claim that they can’t keep it up without charging for it, and then get everyone to pay since they are addicted like Crack. I think they’ll hop to Pownce instead. Speaking of, why doesn’t Pownce have similar problems?

Maybe they need to write the program in pure Ruby, or maybe they need to use a “faster” language like Java or C++ to write it. The rails community will surely cry if it comes to this, but it will likely be needed.

But either way, someone wake me up when Twitter has some degree of stability. Until then, I think I’ll just have to be out of the loop.