As Twitter’s dominance continues, how will retailers and contact centers react?

Twitter has emerged as a dominant form of communication online.  It connects with your Facebook status, it can be updated by various different platforms on a cell phone, desktop or through a good-old web browser.

I was reading the paper this morning and was somewhat surprised to see that even the Berlin Wall has made it onto Twitter – quite literally.  The Berlin Twitter Wall went online Tuesday, inviting anyone to share their memories of the wall and its collapse on November 9, 1989.  This struck me as interesting – and really hit home how significantly Twitter and other social media impact our every day lives.

In reality though, this shouldn’t come as a surprise.  We are no longer in a world where we must seek out the news – with RSS feeds, following specific people on Twitter, Facebook Communities and the like – the news is coming to us.

So how are businesses using it?  How has Twitter changed the way we do business?  Businesses have begun to adopt live chat as a means of communicating with customers, however this cuts out the IVR greeting used to welcome  customers when they call for help – the automatic greeting that could,  for example, inform customers of new promotions or current problems with service.  I think that there is great potential for Twitter to pick up the slack here, and work simultaneously with live chat and email customer service.

The question is, have businesses really caught on to this idea yet?  And since it is in the realm of good customer service – how is this going to affect the contact center industry?

Comments

[call center]

Contact Center industry is really much better than social medias as far as I know....

[CallMe! Staffing]

Check out this blog post on the impact of social media on the call center industry. http://callmestaffing.com/blog/2010/06/social-media-impact-on-the-call-center-industry/

[inbound call center]

I dont think this would ever affect the call center industry. Twitter is a text based communication and still way different from direct call communication with customers. Call customer services are also more personalized than text based.

[Service Call Centers]

Twitter is one of the best social bookmarking sites, but i don't think if twitter is ok because it has no chat for online communication.