"Still, I fired off a couple emails to Honda’s PR team just in case. To my great surprise, Chris got back to me the next business day"
Why do people think that Twitter is the support page for companies? Honest question.
Maybe it's an american-centric view, or maybe it's my small european mind that cannot comprehend why would someone publicly tweet something to a company instead of sending an email to ask a question.
I had an issue for 2 months with Verizon where they messed up my new phone deliveries by sending me the wrong ones and they didn't ship other merchandise I purchased at the same time. Their customer support was terribly unhelpful, even after repeated escalations. It was enough I nearly went to AT&T[0].
They first wanted to charge me re-stocking fees on an order they very clearly messed up (for the wrong phones delivered). Then they wanted me to pay for shipping on the correct devices, and they incorrectly billed me as well, and it took several escalations to get them to understand I didn't receive my other merchandise either, which they then told me I had to make another support request for. It was a whole mess.
I sent a tweet (and mind you, I'm a nobody) and within 24 hours it was resolved correctly, and they even next day shipped everything to me, which I did not expect.
It will be the last time I ever buy from Verizon instead of Apple directly, but at least it got resolved in the end.
[0]: Still might. I need the coverage of the big 2, unfortunately I can't jump to say, T-Mobile, as a result.
I had to go out of the country, so I overpaid my AT&T internet bill so it would cover 2 months and rounded up by ~10 cents to the nearest dollar amount.
First month bill, no problem. Second month bill, no problem.
Third month bill should be $amount -credit, nope. They took my credit, listed it as an underpayment and applied a fee.
So I go to the store; they can't help with account issues, you have to call.
I call, sit through the waiting music, get a rep who get a rep is quite obviously doesn't care. No "Sorry for our obvious billing mistake" or anything. They correct the account and ask if I will pay right now, I decide that I will since I don't trust their system to update in a timely manner.
The rep then has the audacity to talk about how AT&T charges a convenience fee to pay via phone but they are going to waive it this time.
AT&T fiber and Xfinity cable are the only options in my area....
I still can not understand how they made that error in the first place. It's not like accounting, credits and balances are a new thing. The bill even showed the credit transaction correctly, showing it coming out of the bill balance owed.
I do set up auto payment when I am sure the bill will be stable, this was while I was still in the introduction rate and I wanted to be aware of when the price change hit.
Now the question is, since they messed up what should be a simple accounting transaction, do I trust their billing system to have unfettered access to take funds from my bank :)
I'll let that marinate for a few years first before I decide to trust it entirely.
Though its not rural areas that are the only issue. There's saturation issues with other carriers in some of my travels. Only Verizon and AT&T doesn't fall apart comparatively.
It's still the fastest/only way to receive customer support for a lot of place. It's very sad but it's the truth.
The last time an airline screwed up and refused to fix their mistake the employee at the booth lowered her voice and said "Do you have twitter? You might try complaining there, they don't like it when people complain on twitter" which was just the most depressing thing to hear.
I can much quicker get an answer from Bank Of America--and get a Tier 3 Customer Service person to call me--on X than I can by calling their main number.
The old piece of advice if you were getting stonewalled was to write a personal letter to "$CEO_NAME, $HQ_ADDRESS". I wonder whether that still works today.
It often does. The other thing that has worked for me is contacting the legal department. Probably the same address, c/o legal.
Just don’t say something stupid like, “I’m going to sue you”. If you escalate too far they’ll wait for the summons.
—-
I worked in a department called “hot site support” back in the 90’s for Iomega (maker of the Zip drive). That meant I delt with two things, customers who spent over $100k on hardware, and customers that wiggled their way up to the CEO’s admin. I had carte blanche to resolve the issues and I was just 20 years old and early into my career.
Only if their software thinks you have enough followers, and the software thinks they aren't fake followers.
If you don't have enough potential impact, the humans may never even see your post.
If anyone thinks that insert company here cares about your tweet about your issue because they replies to insert even slightly famous person here, you're deluding yourself.
I once had an insurance problem that was resolved only after I posted about it .. on Livejournal. They'd namesearched themselves and assigned a special team of super-customer service "fixers" (maybe just one person!) to look at complaints on social media.
We all understand that the only customer support channel for Google for things like unjust account cancellations is to post and hope a Google employee reads it, yes?
I myself have always had luck with contacting customer service via Twitter. It's the only reason I have ever used Twitter.
I recently had a problem with FedEx that wasn't resolved with multiple phone calls and emails.
I messaged them on Twitter and had the problem resolved in minutes.
I've had the same luck when I had a problem with a collections department calling my phone daily for 2+ years. They were looking for an individual that must have owned my phone number prior to me.
I told the caller to remove my number from their list every time they called. I sent multiple emails.
I finally had luck by reaching out to their Twitter account and politely threatening to alert my attorney general. The issue was resolved that same day.
I stumbled upon a new way to get out of this same situation - they’d been looking for Joshua for five years by calling my phone, and I am very much not him. All kinds of tactics.
Mid last year, I just offered to pay the debt. Conversation looked like this:
Them: “Can I speak to Joshua?”
Me: “No, he’s not here, and I think he’s dead. But I’ll write you a check right now for the debt amount to stop you calling me. How much is it?”
Them: “So you are Joshua?”
Me: “No, I’m just irritated and you’ve won, I’ll solve this by paying you”
Them: “What is your social security number?”
Me: “Doesn’t matter. How much do I write this check for?”
Them: “We can’t tell you the debt amount without verifying you are Joshua”
Me: “Well, I guess we’re at an impasse then.”
And they haven’t called me again for nine glorious months.
It can depend on the company, but some companies literally don't have a public facing email anymore. I was trying to get in contact with Bank of America of whom I am not a customer because they were (and still are) spamming my inbox and the only human contact I managed at all was via their support Twitter page.
Back when Twitter was the most useful and popular (roughly 2018-2022), it was common for some companies to do support over tweets. Delta Air Lines (@delta) comes to mind.
> Maybe it's an american-centric view, or maybe it's my small european mind that cannot comprehend why would someone publicly tweet something to a company instead of sending an email to ask a question.
German here. Raising a stink on social media is the only thing that helps even for large national companies (cough telco providers cough).
The reason is simple, the callcenters are either absolute doofuses barely capable of following a script or they're artificially restricted by the script. People with access to the corp social media account are more carefully vetted to have brains (because you don't want them to like some pr0n on the official account by accident) and social media criticism always has the potential to go viral, so the agents have a lot of leeway to deal with enraged customers.
I actually think it is just the public nature of it all. If there's a bunch of twitter posts on your page complaining about the product being crap that you're ignoring that already says something. Whereas if you resolve them in public you've turned bad PR into good PR. But bad customer service when they call in is just a rumor.
You mean the cartel ruining (running) the telecommunication services? And then running ads on the radio gaslighting potential customers about how "cheap" they are? Yeah..
Fun fact, it's often cheaper to use a foreign European data plan in Germany than to get a local contract. (Of course your mileage my vary. Some providers forbid it.)
If only it fading away didn't mean instead of being able to treat Twitter as support there's no place to get actual support from a lot of companies. E.g. Google sent me a promotion for a Nest camera if I bought their subscription, and instead of a camera I've had their "support" read the same script about how they'll fix it within a few days since November. At least if I used Twitter as support, other people would see the issue that didn't get resolved.
I would dearly love to return to even the 2021 era of the internet in general. 1999 would be ideal, actually. But I'd settle for most anything up to 2012 or so.
I've been trying to work out what the end date of the good internet was, and if there was a trigger event, and I'm starting to think it was somewhere between Tahrir Square (2011) and Euromaidan (2014); once the political internet became really effective, it had to be countered by those in power.
The selling point software that monitors social media to do support is about brand reputation. If people are saying bad things about your company on social media, then that is hurting your public image, so you should respond to those issues and make sure they get resolved. In practice, this means that the people responding are less likely to be outsourced because the the funding is more than just a support cost. In practice, this means you can often get better support through Twitter than email.
A couple of years back I had a problem with a package that didn't reach me, and it was marked as delivered. The only point of contact that responded in any way was Twitter, the shipping company did not have other functioning way to connect to them.
This was in Spain, so no, not only USA. I have not deleted my X user, even though I never use it, just in case I need to ever go in and contact some company that I can't contact otherwise.
I had to have my password reset a several years ago for some service, and the only mechanism they had to do this was to reach out to the company on Twitter. This would have been around 2018 and I remember thinking it was bizarre at the time.
I think there was a _time_ when this worked; companies were very anxious about their Social Media Presence (TM) so would treat public social media messages, particularly complaints, as priority support cases. You can imagine all sorts of factors which would have decreased its effectiveness in recent years though; overuse, companies becoming more used to social media, the death of a usable Twitter API, making tracking this stuff difficult, the general decline of Twitter (if it's likely to be presented beside Elon Musk retweeting a white supremacist or something, are twitter complaints about your dishwasher being too noisy really all that consequential?)...
It's definitely a thing some people still _believe_ in, though, and some people have twitter accounts which they use _solely_ for moaning about brands (there used to be a fun Twitter account which replied to them, as if from the brand they were moaning about; not sure if it's still a thing).
In India, there are dozens of imposter accounts on twitter that pose as a bank's or telco's official handle.
They are very often the more responsive, and very caring and polite, quick to admit they are at fault ... and lure complainers into sharing personal info on DM on promises of speedy resolution.
This was a problem before Twitter became X. The blue tick mark was the only indicator of genuine accounts. Then X started selling tick marks to whoever pasy 8 dollars.
Facebook has a similar issue (although in this case the accounts may be from India but they go after everyone). People commenting on a company's page will get replies from accounts that set their name to "CUSTOMER SERVICE" or "TECH SUPPORT" (Mr. and Mrs. Support must have really had a specific career path in mind for their child) saying they're here to help and to kindly message them for a solution.
I've tried reporting these and Meta really does not care. Report as scam, nope looks fine to us. Report as fake name, nope looks fine to us. I don't think I've ever seen their report system work.
Some still are anxious about it, but others have seemingly stopped caring, as I think they believe their near monopoly positions means bad PR no longer matters. Looking at Comcast in particular.
"Still, I fired off a couple emails to Honda’s PR team just in case. To my great surprise, Chris got back to me the next business day"
Why do people think that Twitter is the support page for companies? Honest question.
Maybe it's an american-centric view, or maybe it's my small european mind that cannot comprehend why would someone publicly tweet something to a company instead of sending an email to ask a question.