Twitterville and customer satisfaction

Twitterville by Shel Israel details the history of the social media tool and explains how it is being integrated into business and put to effective uses. It’s amazing how Twitter is helping companies find new avenues of reaching out to customers. Chapter 4 of Twitterville states how Comcast had god awful customer service. They were infamous for it: even having sites dedicated to bashing Comcast and videos posted of the poor service of their repairman. I know this first hand because I use to have Comcast Cable and they gave me nothing but terrible service for their terrible product. Comcast was horrendous on the phone and never solved the problem and their boxes would always malfunction. The fact that Comcast was able to use Twitter to turn around their customer service demonstrates how powerful of a tool, Twitter really is. Twitter is revolutionizing customer service and making it easier for companies to help customers and for customers to reach for help. It is way easier and more convenient to seek help on Twitter as opposed to waiting on the phone all day.
Jet Blue follows its customers on Twitter so they can monitor customer satisfaction and see how they can improve their service. Jet Blue amongst others are successfully using this social media tool and integrating it into their business to gain a competitive advantage. It is magical that in 140 characters or under, a company can save/maintain a customer relationship. Companies have used Twitter to please frustrated customers and turn those customers into happy ones. It’s fascinating how Twitter can give customers power over corporations. The simple threat of a negative tweet can get companies on their hands and knees trying to please unhappy customer. Companies have been doing everything they can to correct the problem and even giving incentives. Companies will do anything to prevent negative publicity from being broadcasted over the internet. So many users are using social media now and if one person tweets negative about an experience that they had. This one negative experience can easily reach 100,000 after a few degrees of separation and some retweets. This shows how social media is evolving and cannot be ignored. I started using Twitter for this class solely and I noticed that every store I shop at and every product I use has a Twitter. My Beats headphones just snapped in half the other day and I tweeted to @beatsbydre and they sent me back what I have to do to get a new fixed pair of headphones. I am seeing firsthand how if you call a company out on Twitter, they will do whatever they can to insure that customers are having a positive experience with their product. In away twitter is being used to improve customer satisfaction, thus hopefully increasing gains and for damage control. This was a really interesting read. I learned a lot. I rate this reading a 8/10.