Josh Lowensohn from Webware reports that Comcast is doing some good deeds via Twitter. From an innocent rant to a now-satisfied customer, Comcast’s Customer Outreach was there to help.
I can’t blame Comcast for helping, either. It’s cost-effective (free), useful, scalable and accessible.
At the heart of the article, Josh twittered:
Comcast isn’t letting me hop online without installing something on my computer. No thank you.
And approximately three hours later, ComcastCares responded with:
@Josh The initial setup establishes your user name info and the MAC address for the modem to initialize. send me an email we can bybass
(Yes, “bypass” was misspelled, but this inaccuracy reflects a real human on the other side.)
At the surface some might say this is just good PR or “brand management.” This would be true if a customer uncovered something as egregious as the experience Vincent Ferrari had with AOL, or the infamous Comcast Technician Sleeping video. Legitimately, there is a need for companies out there to engage their customers — no matter how important (or unimportant) they may seem.
So how does ComcastCares do this, surely they don’t read every Tweet, right? They probably use a scanner like TweetScan to scan for anything with “Comcast” or “Com cast” to find customers venting, usually in need of empathetic and responsive customer support. (Another great thing with the Twitter API, their agents can simultaneously use it under one account.)
This makes me warm inside to see a large company leverage social media for customer service, and all under 140 characters or less and without a huge outbreak of chaos.
