You should do Tech support on Twitter

Tech support is something that you have to do as you build and distribute a product or just provide a service. Most of the time, having support email address in form of support@companyname.com and startups like UserVoice and GetSatisfaction make great tools for creating positive environment where discussions and support can happen. These are all very passive forms of support, you sit there and wait for somebody to come by and throw a problem towards you.

Good news is that Twitter allows you to be proactive in your support efforts as you can monitor/eavesdrop on different conversations and engage with these users, providing helpful suggestions and answering their questions.

This requires a lot of effort on a part of support team, as they need to actively reach out to the people that mention you brand and find the right balance between helpful and annoying or even creepy (a lot of people don’t realize their Tweets are public and searchable).

A few reasons why you need to actively search Twitter, instead of just waiting for support emails:

• It’s much easier to write a quick Tweet with a rant than write an email
• You can ask people to send you email with further description of the problem, so you can catch much easier weird problems
• Honest feedback because they’re friends are listening.
• If you manage to help them, their happines/satisfaction will be visible to their followers.

Remember to find a balance and that not every Tweet that mentions your company or product should be answered.

What are your experiences with doing tech support via Twitter? Too much effort for the output?