Bob Collins
On Monday, John Moe, doing a great job filling in on MPR’s Midmorning, jumped into the mainstream media hot tub with Twitter. There’s only been about 100 stories about Facebook and Twitter in the Twin Cities in the last week,so while I enjoyed the show, I declared myself a conscientious objector to any more infatuation with Twitter.
But that’s before I saw the blog, New Media Chatter, in which a guy stranded at an airport, issues a call for help to the airline that stranded him.
It’s a good lesson about what Twitter is and what it isn’t where business is concerned. Twitter won’t rescue you if you have lousy customer service, so there’s no reason to use it just so you can say you’re one of the cool kids now. If you have poor customer service without the latest gadget, you’ll probably have poor customer service with it.
The guy’s airline never helped him, so he issued a call — via Twitter — to see if Southwest Airlines could help him. In the end, it couldn’t, but it tried; it tried a lot.
The message from all of this? The blogger says:
(Twitter) is not about posting links all the time, cool videos or such. It is about dealing with your customer and creating positive brand awareness at that moment. If you are a company, you see an unhappy customer out there, you need to move quick and communicate! @JetBlue could of said “got your tweet, will follow up soon” something to let me know they were working on it. Something..just let me know you have not forgot about me. Cause if you do not your competition will do this:
My take-away? People are getting hung up on Twitter and missing the more basic picture.
How do we get this deep into a recession and how do some companies still not understand that just showing the customer you care about them doesn’t cost you a dime, and probably will keep you in business? You can’t lay off people fast enough to offset the lost business from poor customer service.
