Twitter Response Panel

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

Overheard is one of the best ideas that Get Satisfaction has produced

Overheard is a service of Get Satisfaction, which utilizes the Summize API. It pulls in tweets to your company twitter account (like @mozillafirefox), and it can also scan for keywords you list (like firefox, thunderbird, and mozilla). Then, it will show you these tweets, with a button that will let you turn the tweet into a conversation (be it a Question, Idea, Problem, or just a Discussion). Afterward, it will message the user with a twitter @reply and, if they check their replies page (or use an external Twitter application, which by default shows you the replies), they'll see it and know they can go and continue the discussion.

This is great. Let's say I'm having an issue with Firefox and, as I really don't care to update to Firefox 3 as Firefox 2 is working fine, I tweet something along the lines of "Firefox 3 isn't ready yet, I'm downgrading to Firefox 2". A mozilla representative can take that out and say, "What's wrong, what would make Firefox 3 ready for you?". If they choose to answer (and a few do, but when the twitter replies API system is down, like it is now, it's hard to say people are ignoring what they might just not even be seeing), I might say "oh, well, uh, it crashes with gmail sometimes". The mozilla rep can then tell me "Oh, do you have Skype installed? That has an extension that messes with gMail, here's how to disable it." as well as perhaps link me to the support page for issues with gmail crashes (if it exists).

The end result: Customer retained, made happier that someone cares and is looking out for them, and is damn impressed that their cry of anguish was met with a helpful response. And you know what? They tell their friends. One by one, two by two, they become Firefox users simply because of this excellent word of mouth.

Support Bug 442861.

July 02 @ 09:37 AM | 65 Comments | Tags: mozilla, getsatisfaction, overheard, twitter, customerservice | Trackback