About two years ago my cableTV/Internet/wireless/HomePhone service provider, Rogers, started to use Twitter as one path for customer feedback and support requests. While many of their customers have expressed their frustration with service issues ranging from outages to account corrections via this Twitter account, there are nine Rogers employees who track and follow up at @rogershelps. Having met a few members of the team at local events, they report having significant success at addressing reported issues.
Over the past couple of months Skype has been upgrading both its community forum and social networking activity with a revamped community forum, called Skype Support Network, and a Facebook page.
Last Friday Skype announced the addition of the @skypesupport Twitter feed:
We’re committed to our customers and we know how important it is to provide support where you want to have conversations. It’s no surprise that a lot of our you are hanging out in social networks and forums, and want us to be part of the conversation providing answers and help wherever it’s needed.
So, we hope you agree that our efforts to increase our support presence in Twitter and Facebook will improve our ability to address your questions. But, we’re not done yet — there is more to come with the additional steps we’re taking to continue our path towards faster, better, more social ways of helping you. We are relentlessly committed to serving you and continuing to improve our products and support.
To use it, go to @skypesupport where you will find an ‘invitation” to “Tweet to Skype Support” (whether you are “Following” or not); clicking on the message box will enter the text “@skypesupport” after which you can enter your issue in 126 characters or less.
While a Skype user’s initial request will show up in the user’s feed, the response comes in the @skypesupport feed with a “^NN” at the end to indicate which of the Skype Community Support team (not necessarily Skype employees) has provided the response. Here’s one engagement that took place within an hour prior to publishing this post:
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From the user’s Twitter feed |
Skype Support Response |
Bottom Line: It’s all about engaging the customer and letting him/her know you care; however, in today’s social media world there are many paths to engagement. Unless you frequented the former Skype forums, there were few paths to finding support until a month or two ago. Skype’s recent adoption of a new “community forum” format, Facebook and Twitter as support tools are certainly helpful steps in the right direction. It’s a challenge when you have a “free” service, yet so many demanding users. Hopefully, as Rogers has experienced, these will all lead to more adoption and acceptance as well as tools for learning learning more about real customer issues that need to be addressed.
One more resource: Check out Voice On The Web’s Skype Reference Guide in the sidebar where I am gradually updating the pages based of over five years of following Skype and adding new pages as new services and features become available such as Skype for iPad and the ability to make and receive Skype calls from your home phone.
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