Ask HN: How companies use Twitter for customer service?

Most of the companies doing customer support via Twitter are either very small (as in, 20-100 people) or very large (as in major banking companies).

In both cases, very few people handle the Twitter accounts in general, and usually they reveal some part of their identity. Some companies decide to create multiple customer service accounts for multiple people as well.

My guess is, they have some power-user applications running some searches for key words (obviously company names) and maybe, if they are really serious, some sentiment analysis (e.g. "Regions sucks!" is much more important than "headed to Regions then to lunch.")

The larger companies will hire a small team, or may add this to the responsibility list of someone who they feel takes initiative. Companies like MediaTemple have customer support folks who monitor this like any other channel, with a scheduled switchoff to other support reps. Small companies have someone doing this and usually many other tasks at the same time.

This isn't directly related to the question, but I wanted to share my story anyway: I successfully used Twitter when I had some issues with Expedia.

Long story short, one leg of my flight was cancelled and I instead took a bus. I was promised I would get a refund with 2 weeks, yada yada, and I end up not getting it. After 2-3 more phone calls and similar cycles, I get tired and post to them publicly on twitter and facebook.

Lo and behold, they got on the case immediately and I got my refund in the next day or two.

Is there a moral there though? Should one use twitter and/or facebook to give a company poor publicity and then have them specially take care of you? Unclear, but since this was a case where I had already tried to deal with them on the phone 3-4 times, I felt justified.

They do it the same way as narcissistic techies do it. They "listen" for @ mentions throughout the day via twitter clients. Years ago I tweeted about comcast service issues and 5 min later I received a phone call from a comcast service manager. They must have a customer service team who deals with customers on twitter and a small team of "managers" who jump on cases to put out the fires that need immediate attention.

My two cents: there are companies providing social media CRM services that provide real time 1. market sentiment on their customers opinions 2. alert when complaining tweets require client service to follow up. The monitored tweet volume is very small as the key words are mostly limited to company names or key products. Especially most complain directly @company handle. Most of this can be done manually, to take my previous CPG client as an example, people from each merchandise group manually check the amazon review on the product skew they run and work with customer service together to follow up on bad reviews. They try really hard to collect online feedback to understand what people like and not like about the products.