New Twitter Tool Makes Complaining a New Experience

If you are thinking of complaining on Twitter about a company's service, your grumble might be more effective than you think. A customer relations management firm is now offering a service that lets companies monitor and deal with comments about them on the site.

Salesforce calls its product the 'Service Cloud' and already covers posts on Facebook. The Twitter functionality will be added free of charge to existing customer accounts.

Complaints In Context

While Salesforce uses some serious jargon in its publicity, their product is remarkably simple. It takes advantage of the fact that a company can already search Twitter for references to itself or its products to get an idea what people are saying.

However, it now automates the process and does a better job of organizing the information. For example, when it finds a Twitter post mentioning a company, it will put together copies of the full chain of replies the post came in to put it into context. (Source: cnn.com)

The service also "empowers enterprises to be active participants on Twitter by enabling them to funnel relevant solutions from the Service Cloud knowledge base into a Twitter post, effectively joining the conversation." (Source: foxbusiness.com)

If you're thinking that sounds like a fancy way of saying the software simply lets firms post a link to an online help page, you're right.

Another advantage of the software is that it allows companies to keep track of which problems are cropping up regularly and should be a priority for fixing. It's based on systems that gather together data from telephone support lines and online help facilities.

You Are Being Watched

There are a couple of potential problems with the service. Customers may be pleased to get a rapid response to a problem after mentioning it in a Twitter post, but they may also be freaked out knowing they're being monitored in this way.

There's also the question of how easy it is for the software to filter out genuine customer service complaints from wider grumbles. For example, there are plenty of people posting negative comments about AIG these days, but few of them are about issues customer support staff can resolve.