So, sometimes companies want to twitter. Currently, the only method is to share the name and password, and maybe sign your tweets like @bpp does. Kinda sucks, especially if your goal is to respond to a LOT of people.
Recently, I helped turn We All Hate Quickbooks into a disused support section. Better than nothing, I guess. The situation was, @kirasw and @tadmilbourn were replying to people complaining about quickbooks with links to the Twitter forum they set up. That worked, kinda, except people would have to make a new account. I'm pretty sure you can reply at getsatisfaction without making much of an account, and I think the site's a little friendlier, but that's my opinion.
Anyway.
The idea of turning unhappy users (venting) into happy ones works sometimes: people will retweet "hey, Mozilla saw my complaint and opened a support thread, awesome". However, a lot of the mentions of Firefox are the same recurring problem, which is why the (unofficial) helper, @firefox_answers, has a LOT of posts of the same canned response (which people notice). The other bad issue with the canned response is someone will actually see how he repeats "disable your addons" a lot and come to the conclusion that there is a deeper issue, when in fact it's usually just the bad Skype extension. My goal is to make this easier for users, a little more custom, and a lot more awesome.
I want to make a control panel that utilizes the Summize API, as well as possibly my own personal summize (ugh, I am not that good a programmer, so that might be quite difficult) for other services like Jaiku, Identi.ca, and Pownce. If one already exists, let me know. These will have canned responses, as well as canned urls (so that I can limit the box to 140 characters, minus the URL + space, and minus the username responding to plus two spaces for the @ and the space after the name, for personal responses). As well, it will filter by language, so that support can be in your language, and that you can help people near you. Of course, this will be usable for more than just Mozilla, so it is likely that after refinements my "Help the helpless" panel will become public. Open source? Maybe, but I'll definitely have some license where if you're making money because of my panel (and keeping people using your product and purchasing upgrades count), you need to give me some money, because hey, I need to eat.
Commence telling me which license I should open source it under, heh.
July 06 @ 05:48 AM | 1 Comment | Tags: twitter, overheard, support, mozilla | Trackback