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By JeffreyRomano, June 8, 2009 1:22 pm

Recently, I had a bad experience with a company selling training material. I had ordered a particular product and had mistakenly been provided and charged for another more expensive one. Naturally, I was not too happy about this, especially since I was not sure what the benefits of the more expensive product included.

So I opened a ticket with customer support complaining. I also complained on Twitter. After a few hours, to my complete surprise, I receive an email from customer support titled something like ‘Follow up on Twtiter complaint.’  The company apologised, gave me the correct product and provided me with an explanation of what the benefits of the more expensive product were.  

Turns out both products are pretty cool and I won’t be asking for my money back again. I might even buy something else from them in the near future. Customer Support managed to turn an angry customer into a satisfied one. Mission accomplised. Naturally, they also earned some Twitter praise too.

Conversations on Twitter are very often ‘branded’ in the sense that a very high percentage of conversations (if not Tweets) center around brands and what they are doing. This fact is very important to customer support departments in particular, who are now increasingly listening in on what their customers are saying in contrast to simply acting on direct complaints they receive.

My personal definiton of customer support is “the way in which the brand meets its customers’ needs after a purchase has been completed.” Taking this into consideration, brands can benefit a lot by seeing what their customers are saying via Twitter’s search function. In my case, a recognition of my complaint and one email turned me from this to this

Another useful tool is the Google feature allowing you to see what new online content related to your brand has been generated within the last day, week or any other time period.  This can be a very helpful tool not only for reputation management but also to spot unhappy customers. It is a more time-consuming process than just following Tweets, though it can be very effective and impressive on the customer.

This creative use of the expanding social aspect of the web is increasingly becoming expected by customers. When I complained on Twitter I half expected some kind of recognition of my complaint and this is partly because more and more companies are using Twitter for customer support. For more information on companies which use Twitter for this purpose, check out this article by Sarah Perez. If you are interested in implementing Twitter in your company’s customer support, read this How To article on Mashable.

If you have valuable insights or links on this topic, feel free to contribute via the comments section.