On the weekend I had an awesome customer support experience, which I want to share with you. I installed the new Twitter client Tweetdeck and in the beginning I had a few problems with it and just twittered about it.

Suddenly - just a few minutes later - I had a reply form Tweetdecks evangelist JCgeekGirl and actually got support from her. On a Sunday evening! I could fix my problem and had another question a few minutes later. I twittered again about it with just mentioning the product name and of course got another reply.

Think about Twitter as customer support channel

That was really a perfect customer support experience. No Hotline I needed to call, no being on hold, no need to change the medium - quick response via the channel I used. I even haven’t actively started this support situation - the support came to me!

I know - in this case its pretty obvious because their product is about Twitter, but nevertheless:

Companies with international geeky products should really think about having a steady search on their product related keywords on Twitter to directly reply to people who tweet about their products, if they have questions or problems.

That’s more valuable and has more impact than every ad on social networks Introducing a call center agent to Twitter to react on product related tweets isn’t a big issue. Clients of me have done similar things already with support for people in virtual worlds like Second Life.

Maybe just do a search on your product name with Summarize - a search platform for Twitter - and look if its worth it to think about it seriously. If you find hundrets or thousands of people chatting about your products, this can really be a great opportunity to become not only part of the conversation, but also to provide your customers with an awesome customer support experience!