Web designer Bill Nab was fed up. His Qwest DSL Internet service was, on good days, slow; on bad days, nonexistent. So the Pueblo West resident turned to his Twitter account to vent.
“I sent a tweet, out of pure frustration,” expressing his dissatisfaction, Nab said.
Three minutes later, Qwest answered the tweet.
A customer-service representative had been alerted to Nab’s beefing tweet, contacted him and quickly diagnosed his DSL problem.
“It really caught me off-guard,” Nab said. “This kind of changes things. I didn’t have to call and wait on hold for 20 minutes.”
Social media such as Twitter have taken on a new realm in a not-so-social context: helping companies connect quickly with tech-savvy customers.
Virtually every business sector increasingly is turning to Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn as marketing tools.
But Qwest and other service companies are using high-tech media in new ways that transcend traditional marketing and instead focus specifically on customer complaints.
Until now, it has been little more than promoting products, services or some other announcement to customers.
Now, Qwest is one company using software to alert it whenever its name is used in Twitter posts called “tweets,” quick electronic messages of no more than 140 characters. A team of eight monitors the tweets, determines whether they are service-related, then quickly communicates with the customers and launches efforts to fix problems.
Twitter is big. Users in the U.S. number more than 7 million, a 15-fold increase from one year ago, according to Nielsen Online.
About 24 percent of North American businesses surveyed by Forrester Research plan to cut traditional advertising this year in favor of social-media spending.
“We view this as a trend,” said Brian Stading, Qwest’s vice president of sales- support operations. “It doesn’t replace our existing communications channels, but it certainly augments them.”
It’s working. Nab called the Twitter interaction vastly superior to his many previous dealings with Qwest.
Qwest said it conducts several hundred Twitter communications a week with customers and is seeing steady increases in e-mail contacts through talktous@qwest.com.
Qwest was later to the game than many companies, formally unveiling its corporate Twitter function this month after a soft launch in March.
Other companies are trying social media to connect to consumers.
Englewood biotechnology firm Baxa Corp., for instance, recently launched Facebook and LinkedIn pages.
Baxa vice president Marian Robinson said use of the networks “furthers our brand position to social-media users who are technologically savvy and forward-thinking.”
Steve Raabe: 303-954-1948 or sraabe@denverpost.com
