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Twitter Apparently Forgot the Most Important Part of Growing a Business: Customer Support
When I was a young kid trying to make a buck, I quickly learned that the most important thing I offered was my service. I actually got more business just by providing great customer service and that made me just continue to increase the service I provided. Whether it was selling newspapers, coding HTML for a client, buying millions of dollars in media or processing business cards, service has always been my differentiator. When I work with startups, I stress the importance of providing the best possible support at all times.
I’ve heard stories about how tough it is to actually get any help from Twitter’s customer service but until recently I haven’t had a need to contact them for help. In January, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone heralded their great support department on the Twitter blog so I was certainly hoping for a quick resolution to my issue.
Here’s an overview of my issue and why I’ve contacted support for help. I am having an issue with my @cloudcontacts account. For some reason, I can’t get the account to work correctly. Half of the time when I load twitter.com, I get a login box which won’t let me login. However if I just refresh the page enough times (never the same number), eventually it lets me in. Direct messages never show up correctly, and when people try to access the page for the @cloudcontacts account, they too get a "That page doesn’t exist!" message but if you refresh that page, you eventually get the account too (although today the account seems to not show up as many times as I refresh). I can’t reset the password because it gets stuck in this "no account/yes account" problem. I’ve tried to create a new @cloudcontacts account – the registration page says it’s available, but on submission, it says it’s taken.
I went ahead and submitted an issue ticket (which was hell because they want you to be logged in which as you can see above only works on random loads). I received a quick auto-reply with a message about passwords but nothing about what happens next. I replied to that message asking for additional help but heard nothing back. This week I submitted another ticket with more specific details about the issue after the research I did. This time I didn’t receive a password auto-reply, instead, I received the following reply:
Your request has been received, and is being reviewed by our support staff. Twitter Support is currently experiencing a backlog: in some cases, it may be 5 to 7 business days before you receive a reply. Problems and issues will be investigated first, followed by general requests and questions.
Does this mean I will receive any help? My issue is certainly a "problem" and not a general request or question. Based on the people who emailed me after my first tweet about the issue, the answer is "who knows". Orli Yakuel of the popular Go2Web20 directory has a good post about the (lack of) support that Twitter provides. She’s waiting over a month as are countless others pleading for help.
I’ve tried twittering/messaging to the Twitter founders but they haven’t replied either.
Here’s a company that is in their honeymoon period where blogs and mainstream media can’t get enough of the service (more on that later). Twitter has raised $55 million dollars in funding. If there is a backlog of support issues as the auto-reply states, why not take a tiny bit of cash, hire 10-20 support people for a week, and get the backlog resolved? I am willing to bet that the majority of support issues would take minutes to resolve or answer and more customers would be satisfied.
Let’s forget about the customer for a minute and think about if we were working at Twitter. How great would it be to get the queue cleared out so we don’t have to see a backlog everyday and could focus on the product?
The interesting thing here is that Twitter is heralded as this great platform for providing customer service with major companies like Zappos, Dell, Comcast, Mosso and JetBlue using the service for support. Yet the underlying platform company doesn’t provide the same level of support for the companies who use their platform.
I am sharing this long story for one reason: for you to take a moment and think about the support you provide on your web applications. Are you making sure each and everyday that your customers are satisfied with the support you provide?
My hope is that the issue listed above is resolved expeditiously so I can use the account to communicate with my customers and during the SXSW festival. I will report back once the issue is resolved.
@Fred:
I agree with you that staffing up while preserving company culture & spirit is a challenging task.
However, hiring senior, knowledgeable people for the transitional period of time to allow the staff to grow to a team has proven to be an useful means – not just for newly opened restaurants.
And I do not believe that budget is an issue here… :)
Just a thought about the money that Twitter has been given (which seems to be a theme that comes up a lot).
Is it possible that the money has been invested with strings attached? In other words, do the investors stipulate that the money is to be used for specific purposes (e.g. building the infrastructure or developing features that the investors require)? If this is the case then there may not be any funds in the budget for things such as support staff.
Note that this is pure speculation on my part. There are probably people out there who know more about it than I do who could comment on this.
How can you expect them to have any costumer support when they don’t even have a revenue model?
I’m sure once they include a revenue model into the picture where people need to be charged to use the website customer service will come into effect.
[...] learn more about the technology, expansion plans, international services, etc. Since my previous support requests went completely unanswered I have no idea how to schedule a meeting so I plan to just stop [...]
great post – twitter just thinks they can get away with anything these days because the media loves them
I get a sense that they are still winging a lot of things. I doubt that they have proper support channels established and error notifications. Hopefully they will understand the importance of customer centric business focus and get their kinks ironed out before it becomes too late.
I think that the people at Twitter are probably overwhelmed by what it has become and the speed with which it is growing. The number of users has increased dramatically and the number of messages has as well as more people use it in ways that were probably never envisioned.
There are lots of complaints about Twitter but I think we have to remember that this is a free service. While they are getting funding it isn’t coming from you or me. I think we need to cut them a little slack.
the price of a service does not matter when it comes to service. and as i noted, it would be DAMN easy for them to fix the issue quickly and cheaply. it just appears on the public side that they would rather be in the ny times and on charlie rose.
always take care of your house first
If they’re overwhelmed and too busy, they need to consider hiring more manpower. With the economy in disarray, people would lunge for the opportunity to work at Twitter.
It’s a free service that was successful because of people like you and me, LoneWolf. Twitter shouldn’t forget about us.
I had a ticket open for 4 months before I received support, and once they did address it, they didn’t even address it to my satisfaction. (Allen, with regards to the comment below, a 2 month turnaround is lucky!) To make matters worse, apparently Twitter switched its customer support helpdesk two times since I submitted the ticket, so I had to keep resbmitting it. I learned that I should store a local copy of all my complaints since then.
I finally got a response, of sorts, to a ticket I opened in January. The response was an automated response telling me my ticket had been open for more than two weeks. Thanks, knew that.
If twitter’s own help system is to be believed, no one from twitter has looked at my ticket since January.
Twitter appears to have a problem with long usernames. My guess is that part of the system has a limit, but the part which lets you register doesn’t enforce the limit. So you end up creating an account which you can use as long as you stay logged in, but if you log out, or log in via another twitter client, you can’t because now you’re hitting the part of the system which DOES enforce the username length.
When I try to reset the password for the account, the twitter system accepts both the userid and registered email, but no email ever appears.
Honestly, they should shut down their support system at this point, they don’t respond to it. Far better to set the correct level of expectations (no support) than deceive people into thinking that they’ll get a response if they open a ticket.
wow january – that doesn’t leave me much hope
today i will try contacting their investors to get their take.
I agree 100% that any company should offer good support to their customers if they want to stay in business.
But who exactly are twitter’s customers?
Are you? How much did you pay to use twitter?
Those that pay, are customers. Those that do not, are just users of a free service.
AVG Antivirus comes in 2 flavors: paid & free.
Grisoft considers those that pay their customers and will provide good customer service to them, through email, answered by actual Grisoft employees.
Those that use the free version are just users and are told if they have any problems or issues to go to the user2user support forum and help each other figure it out. You can’t even report a bug or false positive unless you pay them first. That forum isn’t monitored by any employees of Grisoft, it’s strictly volunteers.
You should be happy that twitter doesn’t work like a lot of other free services and they didn’t just email you a link to a forum full of other confused twitter users, to answer your questions.
Unless you paid them for your twitter account, as L-eWolf said, cut them some slack.
Dearest app103: show me where to pay for twitter and my client would consider it.
If twitter do not want to or cannot provide support to free users, fine, remove the support link, direct people to GetSatisfaction or elsewhere. But by providing and encouraging people to file requests through the ZenDesk site they are tacitly if not explicitly saying that they have some sort of support process, just not one that mere mortals understand.
And as far as free goes: many people are providing value back to twitter by developing tools atop the twitter API. Developers get marginally better support for development issues, but only marginally. Where’s the value in return?
app103 customer in the dictionary is also
One who consumes goods and services
I just noticed that the Name field in this comments section is changing the characters “on” to a dash for some reason. LoneWolf comes out as L-eWolf and Anonymous as An-ymous.
As for the length issue you noted in your followup comment, I use @LoneWolfMuskoka which is longer than @cloudcontacts and haven’t run into any problems like you are describing. It could possibly be that 13 characters is somehow hokey, but I doubt that — it doesn’t seem like an edge case.
I wonder if you may have put some non-printable or white space characters into the original account name when you signed up. Some parts of the system may match the name while others don’t. It may also be possible that the character encoding could have been screwed up somewhere and some of the servers handle it and others don’t. That might explain why refreshing a random number of times gets you logged in.
Anyway, I’m just guessing at what the problem might be and the point is moot since I can’t do anything about it anyway. I hope that the issue gets sorted out for you soon.
When looking back through the comment stream I see that I was replying to a comment by icp, not Allen. So, icp, what was the account name that you had trouble with? How long was it? It would be interesting to know if there is an actual limit on some parts of the system.
I’d be very surprised if one of the founders of Twitter were to address a user’s customer service issue.
These platforms are great to use, but we have to step back I guess and remember that they are also free, and so as they say, sometimes you “get what you pay for ” in terms of service I suppose.
I’ve had the same issue with them. My email server crashed so my emails must have been bounced back to them so they say that box doesn’t exist. Shouldn’t have been but it was. I can’t get them to reply to my ticket either.
I’ve changed my email with twitter to be a different user on the same domain and it works fine.
They need to have better customer service. that’s for sure.
I’m not sure what kind of work you do Allen, but figuring out what is causing a bug in a complex network of servers and software is not “DAMN easy”. There are currently something like 7 million people signed up for Twitter. Things that affect a single user have lower priority than things that affect 100’s or 1000’s or even 1000000’s.
I agree that they could hire more support people — but who will train them? The current support people who are already overwhelmed.
I agree that they should be more forth-coming in their communication with users who submit problems.
They didn’t plan for Twitter to become what it has. Hopefully they’ll be able to catch up to where they are soon.
Naturally not all issues are "damn easy" but I’d bet the majority are just user problems like password resets, email changes, etc. This is how most customer support departments work.
There’s absolutely no excuse for their lack of support. As for training – yes, the new people need to be trained. Twitter says they are using some high-powered support system Zendesk, so that should put the issues into queues. Get x people trained on y and z issue and put them to it. Then train x people on a and b, etc.
I thought you were referring to fixing your specific problem rather than the entire support issue question. As for the support thing, I’d agree that getting it done should be easy. I doubt that it could be done quickly though. Just the pure scale of it is hard to imagine.
allen
it is true that they are swamped and they are trying to scale the customer service team but that involves hiring and when hiring, you always want to be careful to hire correctly, and also training. they are scaling their customer service team but not as fast as the service is scaling
have you tried getsatisfaction? a lot of twitter users find that service useful
fred
Thanks for the reply Fred- I agree that hiring correctly and carefully is important. I also think that getting that queue emptied is also of importance. You can see from this thread and if you do some searches on Twitter that users are down to begging for help. Instead of getting the house in order, it sure seems that every possible minute the founders and executives at Twitter are spending their time in front of the "camera".
I have not tried getsatisfaction. I clicked on the help tab on twitter and followed their instructions. As of this comment I have still received no help from them.
Perhaps it’s something for you to think about as an investor in this company.