Member Avatar for MktgRob

I was reading an interesting blog on Social Media Today about Customer Service being supplied by or accessed through twitter. One of my clients brought the blog to my attention and is interested in the possibility of using twitter in the company's customer service efforts. To be honest, while I have read about theoretical use of twitter in this fashion and I know that some consumer-oriented companies are doing this, my client is a B2B operation and my first reaction is to tread lightly as you do not want to alienate or annoy customers. Is anyone working with a
B2B company or knows of one that is using Twitter as part of their customer service initiatives?

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Dani AI

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’s instinct to “tread lightly” is sensible, and ’s firewall/policy point is exactly the kind of operational constraint that makes Twitter a supplement rather than a substitute for B2B support. Twitter is useful for fast public updates, discovery (spotting issues early), and lightweight triage, but account-level work, billing, contracts and anything with sensitive data should live in secured, auditable channels.

Put a few simple controls in place: dedicate a clear support handle (separate from marketing), publish support hours and an SLA for initial acknowledgements (recommended: within one hour during support hours), integrate social contacts with the helpdesk/CRM so every tweet/DM becomes a tracked case, and train agents on what must move to private channels. Make it explicit in policy that order numbers, account credentials and contract details should never be handled on public tweets.

A small, repeatable workflow keeps things manageable:

  1. Listen — saved searches, a customer list and mention monitoring.
  2. Triage — classify as info request, technical issue, outage, or complaint.
  3. Acknowledge publicly with a short template and request a private follow-up.
  4. Create a ticket, escalate if needed, and resolve in secure channels.
  5. Close publicly with a short status update and log metrics (volume, time-to-first-response, resolution rate, CSAT).

Sample public templates:

Thanks @Customer — sorry for the trouble. Please DM your order # so we can look into this.
We're investigating an outage affecting X. We'll post updates here and email customers on file.

Keep channels redundant (phone, email, portal). Track outcomes so the business can judge ROI, and have legal/compliance review the social-support policy before routing account-sensitive issues through social media.

Member Avatar for InsightsDigital

Your client is not the only one. Twitter is seen as a fast, useful, free platform that allows businesses to engage quickly with their customer. The issue is that not everyone Twitters. Period. As a business client, I may not be able to tweet if my company as a fire wall or a policy against visiting twitter using work computers. Thus, if the customer service is solely through twitter, I am concerned.

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