Twitter in Contact Centre & Customer Service

I had a very interesting comment from Simon on a past post, where he asks,

"What's the best example you've seen of a company embedding Twitter in its suite of contact centre channels? I'm interested to know what's seen as the best of the best."

I've covered Twitter in quite a few recent posts ("Cisco Contact Centre on Twitter ", "Cisco Contact Centre on Twitter - part two " and from back in February "Google and Twitter for Customer Service? "), but I haven't really talked much about Twitter as part of customer service in the contact centre.

Part of the challenge is that very little has yet been done beyond trial stages, and as result there's very little research on what best practice might be. It's also the case that a lot of the trials are in B2B environments (such as the two Cisco Twitter feeds I've blogged on), rather than the more traditional B2C environment of contact centre. Datamonitor have a short but interesting report "Twitter and Google as Customer Service Tools" and Forrester have the interesting report: "Using Twitter As A Customer Service Channel".

Forrester cites the US company JetBlue and mentions Bank of America and Comcast. I'm interested to see Jet Blue as an example and their Twitter page is here. To be honest, Twitter is clearly about much more than the traditional narrow definition of 'customer service'. My suspicion is that is about 'customer relationship' but with the focus on the 'relationship' part of things that CRM so completely missed by focusing on 'customer' and 'management'!

The other interesting thing is that JetBlue has always been innovative around customer service. They were one of the first companies to really use home contact centre agents extensively (there's a write up on the business model in Fast Company magazine here), and so it's not a huge surprise to find that JetBlue is they type of company innovating with Twitter.

The interesting thing about Twitter is how fast it all moves, so my suspicion is that best practice will evolve very rapidly as firms practice and play with it.