Comments on: BT Rethink Customer Service, With the Help of Twitter

By: Karen Jones

Karen Jones — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 11:59:07 +0000

Nice to see that BT is actually being more of a communications leader in customer service channels, but surely they should be fixing their core problems first? I’ve just read that they are bringing back 2000 call centre jobs from India in a bid to improve customer service, however me thinks that actually it is to give some of their ‘re-deployee’ employees who are on gardening leave something to do while trying to save some money at the same time!…Check out my full opinion piece on this at http://www.gematech.com/blog

By: Smith

Smith — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 10:18:48 +0000

Interesting story Kev. Very hardly seen, this kind of negligence by customer care executives.

By: Kev

Kev — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 17:03:20 +0000

@Stephen – you’re right, it shouldn’t have come to this. But we could be looking at a turning point in company-customer relations, where social media is used as the primary point of contact, rather than the last point of call.

@Nik – with the right execution, I think it is scalable. If you had many accounts – @jonfromBT, @katefromBT etc, surely you could deal directly with the same person throughout?

By: Catherine

Catherine — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 09:38:08 +0000

Nice story – the problem I find rapidly developing is that social networking has reached a point where I expect to be able to rant about something on Twitter and get an instant response offering help (I realise this is perhaps unrealistic and self-indulgent).

Very frustrating when this doesn’t happen. Most notably regarding HSBC.

By: Stephen Moretti

Stephen Moretti — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 08:17:04 +0000

The call center problem seems to be endemic of all large organisations and the telephone(mobile and landline)/internet/television providers seem to be particularly bad at managing their customer information internally.

I recently blogged about exactly the same issue you’ve had, except with another multi-service provider (http://sn.im/m90×1 – Twitter marketing. Should you? Shouldn’t you?). While I appreciate the level of service I gained from having a moan on Twitter, it really should never have come to that. Support by telephone or internet status page should have directed us to the correct person first time and provided the call centre bod with the information they needed to help resolve our problem quickly and efficiently.

@Nik Sargent : I think there is definitely legs with the idea of using Twitter as a means of support and there are Twitter client out there that mean that you aren’t limited to one person managing a single account. With filtering applied it would be possible to ensure that, yes, you are always dealing with a single person, but it wouldn’t be a single person for all the people sending messages to that account. However, this should not let companies off of sorting out the mess that is their call centres and their CRM systems.

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By: Nik Sargent

Nik Sargent — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 20:57:27 +0000

It’s a cute story, sure, but is it scaleable?

The fact that BT resorted to twitter to solve your problem – and that in solving it has warranted itself newsworthy – merely demonstrates just how broken their customer service and interaction experience is, in my personal opinion.

Maybe they’ve secretly admitted they can’t fix their volume contact channels, so have had to abandon ship and resort to non-realtime communication. Maybe they just want a few brownie points for social media kudos.

BT sells CRM and yet is unable to master it. Your experienced worked because the CRM system became a single person for 24 hours. It worked for you, but it’s not a workable business model.

And while it’s true to say that a good story in the social media domain can hit 100,000 desktops in seconds – thus making for good PR – it’s just as true that a bad one can too… so really, has anything changed?