By
David on November 19th, 2009
Do you use Twitter? If no, why not? If you are not using Twitter, you may be missing out on one of the best ways to contact customer service that has ever been used. Sure, you can call a 1-800 number and sit on hold for 20 minutes…or you can find out what a company’s Twitter name is and contact them that way. I have done this on several occasions in the last 3 weeks and twice my issue was taken care of quickly and to my satisfaction. Beats calling up a customer service rep only to get handed to another one and then hung up on! (Thanks, DirecTV and Bank of America)
First up, Comcast. Since I was canceling DirecTV (who didn’t bother responding on Twitter) and looking for new TV/internet service, I put out a call to my Twitter friends for their thoughts on the Comcast Triple Play (which I wrote about here). While I received many great responses and comments, I was also contacted by Comcast themselves via Twitter. They gave me a contact name to email directly, and a live person CALLED ME to set up service at my house. She went over everything with me on the phone, I got all the numbers up front, I received a discount, and everything went smoothly from then on out. Score one for Twitter!
Next up, UHaul. When I was having difficulty getting a guaranteed truck rental, I bitched about them online and they gave me a number to call and have it taken care of. Finally, some help! After dealing with the guy at my local rental place (who claimed to never remember me each week that I came in to see about my truck), I got UHaul to guarantee me a truck, give me a confirmation number, and tell me what time to pick it up. Needless to say, I gave the local guy a terrible review but I only have good things to say about the help I got online.
Sometimes it fails miserably, like in the cases of DirecTV and Samsung, but more often than not people are having great success using Twitter to contact customer service for their issues. Before you pick up the phone and dial a number, try to use Twitter and see what results you get. You can easily find most corporate Twitter accounts by googling “Twitter + Name Of Company”, but if you happen to need one of the two I just used, here they are:
http://twitter.com/comcastcares
https://twitter.com/UHaul_Cares
Happy customer service Twittering!