Superpowered Customer Service on Twitter

Why is @comcastcares so successful?

The Twitter account, operated by Frank Eliason, is a live Social Media customer service that’s part of a drive by Comcast to haul themselves off the very bottom of US Customer Satisfaction lists. Tweet @ the account and you can get your net and cable connection problems solved by Frank, with updates in real time and with a cheery, can-do attitude.

And as of yesterday @comcast had 27,962 followers at 34,753 total Tweets, which is a pretty good ratio for a celebrity, let alone a telecom tech support account.

But what’s interesting about the success of @comcastcares isn’t the raw follower count: after all, if 25,000 people HAD to follow a tech support account, that would say something pretty unfortunate about the company involved. No, what’s really weird is that people who’ve been fixed up by Eliason continue to follow him, keeping him in the back of their own feeds, working away on other people’s problems.

Of course, you could put this down to people’s laziness or unwillingness to de-follow. As Facebook itself pointed out this week, we tend to find it harder to digitally de-friend people than we do to drift away from them in real life.

But even then, there are obviously loads of people who’ve never had a tech support encounter with Frank but who follow him anyway. He usually takes two or three messages to resolve a single problem, but his follower rate is about 0.8 of his tweet count. So what would make thousands of people continue to follow the ongoing adventures of a mild-mannered tech-support engineer?

You guessed it. Superpowers.

This isn’t the first time a company has successfully Socialised its customer service. As Brian Solis points out, Dell partly brought themselves out of the Dell Hell consumer firestorm with the introduction of Direct2Dell, a blog aimed at humanizing the company with accounts by the people working there.

The Direct2Dell blog told the story of the turnaround in Dell’s customer service, and so whatever its successes it was still a managed PR activity; @comcastcares is revolutionary because it makes one whole segment of the company’s Customer Service activity a totally public conversation. Frank Eliason isn’t a middleman; you can watch him fix your connection himself, from what you begin to suspect must be some kind of Dr. Strangelove-like telecoms command centre deep beneath the Rocky Mountains.

So what is it that makes @comcastcares so hard to put down? I think I’ve figured it out.

I think it’s that he, probably the first live Twitter customer carer-cum-celebrity, can give you an service that’s absolutely unique.

Not just live customer service, that’s no surprise these days (or at least it shouldn’t be).

Not just pleasant customer service, which may not yet be exactly common, but is certainly not the endangered beast it was in the late ’90s.

Not even a guaranteed solution to your technical problem. No-one can manage that.

No, the magic formula is that @comcastcares gives you a combination of all the above, along with a guaranteed, take-it-to-the-bank user unique experience every time.

After all, what he can do is exciting. If you tweet a general complaint about your dead connection, even if you never knew he existed, he may well get in touch right away. A bit like the Thunderbirds.

Jvance: dear COMCAST, please give me the internet connection i pay you so much money for. this is unacceptable. thanks.

Comcastcares: @jvance can I help?

Your outpourings are validated: you’re not a hapless consumer crushed by corporations: suddenly you’re an angry consumer advocate.

Of course, exciting can be scary. Maybe you thought Twitter was a private space full of people just like you. You were shouting your dissatisfaction into the darkness, the ancient cry of the consumer, as ironic as shouting “WHY GOD!?”

And somebody answered.

It’s just as well he’s such a nice guy.

Comcastcares @Nida Does not look like it is the modem, the modem looks like it was up for 3 days. I am going to try something, It will go down for moment

He can hear you call. He can read your electronics. He can check the network and tell you that one of the nodes next to your house isn’t working. And he’ll call up the local agency and kick ass and move mountains and get you working again. He’s famous, in a certain narrow sort of way, and at that moment he is publicly working for you. It’s like a little dose of meeting a superhero: for just a second, you are Lois Lane, Mary Jane or, if you must, Bucky Barnes.

He’s able to make customer service an exciting experience, which is a remarkable ability. And bless him, HE follows YOU the instant he has any contact with you. That’s almost worth going out and cutting some cables. I know people who do more for less attention.

I think people want what I’ve called user-unique experiences, even if the experience is fundamentally the same as the one the guy before you got, and the guy after you. A publicly unique experience is even better. Getting your issue fixed over the phone is no longer a novelty. Getting it fixed by an everyday hero where the world can see, that’s going to take a while to rub off.

But rub off it will, of course. No doubt after this sort of “ambush care” becomes more common, which I reckon it will, there will be a backlash. After all, what you’re being offered by @comcast is not too far from other less welcome random acts of kindness: how about breaking-and-decorating, or hug-mugging?

If corporations can monitor every conversation that contains a complaint about their inadequate service, that means that rival companies can too. In the future companies could respond to your good-natured Twitter grumbling (Trumbling?) about, say, how toilet your mobile phone signal is.

But they could respond not with offers of assistance, but with a pitch for their new rival handset and a satellite confirmation that their rival service would cover you where you were standing when you posted the tweet.

And you know that’s an idea that would sell. Oh @comcastcares, teach me to use these powers for good instead of evil.