Last Thursday, BigPond became the first Australian telco using Twitter (en.wikipedia.org) to provide technical support to customers. For those of you not familiar with Twitter, it’s a micro blogging site that allows users to provide 140 character updates called ‘tweets’.
While there was no formal announcement, awareness of the service spread like wildfire with opinions varying across the spectrum.
Most of the constructive feedback focused on how the service is being implemented, for example:
- Alister Cameron (www.alistercameron.com) talked about how responses were too impersonal and could have been produced by a robot. (For the record, all messages were sent by humans.)
- Stephen Collins (www.acidlabs.org) stated the lawyers were too involved in the process and that our first contact with customers was ‘noncommital, anonymous, boilerplate text’.
- BlogWell (blog-well.com) provided implementation suggestions that started a wide-ranging conversation in the comments section.
BigPond’s Twitter service - an emerging strategy
There’s been a real buzz internally as the BigPond Twitter (twitter.com) team has been assessing the possibilities. Watching this process and working with Brady Jacobsen (twitter.com), Sarah Tinson and Wendy Philips (twitter.com) has been a real pleasure.
It’s backed my opinion that one of the benefits of a corporation fusing social media into their business processes is that it encourages a culture of continuous improvement.
This week BigPond will further develop the Twitter service by:
- making the tone of our communications more conversational by removing the ® trademarks and making the tone of our introduction tweets less robotic like.
- following people that have selected to follow us.
- working on changing our profile format so it’s easier for people to contact us.
While we reference the best practice examples in the United States for guidance, our first priority is the BigPond customer. Our approach is to be pro-active and ask those customers with a service/technical issue online whether they require support. But to be pro-active means we need to make contact with the customer, and this is where it gets complicated.
Protecting customer privacy
One angle not discussed in the online commentary is using Twitter under Australia’s 2003 Spam Act (www.dbcde.gov.au).
Since the early stages of development, BigPond’s primary concern has been protecting the customer’s privacy. We want to ensure that our communications to customers are not commercial electronic messages.
Sending commercial electronic messages without the customer’s consent would amount to a violation under the Spam Act.
Since Twitter was introduced post 2003 and we are the first cab off the rank, a cautious approach, limiting the potential risk is considered the best approach. When a customer responds to our introductory message, we have more flexibility to use a conversational tone.
Although social media is reducing the relevancy of marketing communications, it hasn’t diminished the power of Australian law and the importance of protecting the customer’s privacy.
As the BigPond Twitter service quickly approaches its first week of existence, we will continue to listen and evolve.
I again invite you to leave a comment below, post your thoughts on your own blog or express your opinion on Twitter.
I’ll be responding to your comments and emails form my last blog ‘Is nowwearetalking hitting the mark’ in the next couple of weeks.