Twitter with its 140 character limit has become a staple part of our communications world.
There are corporates that just do not quite get it ... yet, especially when it comes to customer engagements.
A recent power outage brought home the reliance we have on electricity. With nothing working, no TV, internet, WiFi or landline phones. It felt like we were cut off from the outside world, especially as this was during night time.
Fortunately, the mobile phones worked, albeit at a poor speed.
First a call went out to the electricity company, looking for a recorded message on their phone tree. No such luck. Holding for a customer service representative was pointless, with my 70 year old neighbour knocking on my door looking for information.
Going onto the website at dial up speeds was cumbersome as well.
Then I managed to eventually track down a twitter handle. A quick tweet alerting them of the situation proved very easy. Unfortunately no reply, due to the fact that this was a corporate "umbrella" account. To be fair I did gleam this from the timeline, but was hoping that I may be wrong and somebody was monitoring the activity to elicit a response. Zilch, nada.
I went back on the phone and eventually spoke to a customer service rep, who gave me an indication of the problem and approximate timeline, for which I was very grateful. It also transpired that the "social media" team was a different department and they were gone for the day.
The next morning I received a tweet from the "corporate" account pointing me to the "local" distributor, which from my point of view, the customer, is identical, in this case Southern Electric.
As it turns out on twitter, there is @southernelec and then @southernelecPD (PD stands for Power Distributor perhaps?) presence. This may seem very logical from an organisational stand point in a consulting world, but when a customer is looking for a touchpoint in a dire situation logic goes out the window.
The point of this entry is to drive home the importance of understanding the joint-up corporate presence on twitter. Separating accounts and leaving them in isolation is detrimental. From a customers point of view it just makes things confusing and frustrating.