Within a day of posting both tirade and tweet against them, Simplenote’s devs contacted me directly via Twitter reply, blog comment, and personal email apologizing for the password change user-experience, and pledging to fix it for the next build. It’s already been fixed, and I’ve been using Simplenote non-stop ever since.
Fact is, Simplenote’s devs did exactly the right thing. They addressed the problem directly, and humanized themselves. And they did it using Twitter, the humanizing service.
I like referring to Twitter as a “flattening” kind of platform. It’s the type of site where Shaquille O’Neal can have the same banal posts about sandwiches as this person. It proves that celebrities are (spoiler alert!) people too, and it’s where people go to interact with other people, on an uninteresting, sammich-eating level.
So when a company tweets at you — and especially when they @reply to you — it doesn’t feel like a company. It feels like a person. And the weird thing is that it happens a lot.
On my account alone, I’ve gotten replies to complaints/concerns/questions lobbed at game studios, ISPs, software devs, WWDC party hosts, business card printers, and even, erm, artsy erotica sites. Every time, the attention paid on a single-customer level is surprising, and even frustrating experiences and lame parties just feel better when someone makes that tiny effort.
What does Twitter do for customer service? It makes it not feel like customer service; it makes it feel like people. And that’s kinda cool.