Comcast Listening
Mike Arrington had been having trouble with Comcast, his net provider and was not getting a good response via the call centre. He twittered his frustration, someone at the company picked it up and called him, getting the problem sorted. Apparently this is not the only time they’ve done this, with Consumerist finding more examples. Monitoring what is said about you is an essential part of today’s brand management - the Church of the Customer picks up on how salesforce.com are doing this, with their Yahoo Pipes construct that grabs mentions from many places. You have to know what is really felt about the brand, not just hide in your office hoping everyone just goes with what your marketing says.
So monitoring the web for mentions and reacting to them appropriately is marketing that I with many, many other new marketers think is essential. But. But, but but - you need to fix the call centre, the wait times, the front line as well and not just pick up people who have a voice on the web and know how to use. it, just in case they say bad things about you and pollute your search experience. I wonder what Comcast are doing about that?
Monitoring for occasional problems is fine. What happens when something serious affecting thousands of people happens. I doubt they’d be able to sort that out by monitoring Twitter.
Exactly. The fact is the problem should have been sorted out before he got frustrated enough to Twitter. Fix the basics first!