In the past several months, I’ve made some negative (as well as some positive) remarks on Twitter about my experiences with certain corporations. Within minutes of making these remarks, I was bombarded by them apologizing for the inconvenience, asking for more feedback, or telling me flat out that my statement was incorrect. One even tracked me back to my website and sent me a lengthy email via my contact form.
It’s cool how Twitter has actually made this dialog possible with not only corporations, but also politicians, celebrities, and the general public. Someone like me can just casually tell the world what they think, and there are people out there actually listening. We’ve never really had this opportunity before where anyone can get their voice heard. Who would have thought that some corporation would actually care about what I think or say?
1 Responses
Great observation. Speaking from experience, one of the significant problems that many companies have to solve is how to get meaningful feedback on how their products and services are really serving the end users.
Many end users are content to be dissatisfied without contacting the company to give them a chance to respond. But some of these same users would be willing to voice their complaint to their friends. Twitter gives these companies an opportunity to listen in to conversations going on between friends and to respond.
One of my companies provides a consumer based internet service in Iowa City, IA. We would be very happy if every customer that had any kind of problem with our service would notify us of the problem and give us a chance to help them. However, we sometimes find out about problems that customers have had for some time and ones that they have not notified us about. Sometimes it’s the customer’s fault, sometimes it’s ours, but in all cases, we would have been all over it had we known the problem existed.
I know there are some companies that don’t really care, and others that are not equipped to handle negative feedback, but I think there are a whole lot of companies out there that would jump at the chance to right a wrong or address a bad experience if they only knew about it.
Twitter provides a unique opportunity for this type of dialogue to take place.