How Twitter Benefits A Company’s Reputation
February 21, 2009
Not so long ago, companies could just about get away with mistreating their customers. It could be suggested that they realised that customers wouldn’t bother with the effort of taking small issues further than they needed to. However, word of mouth can spread fast about companies online; which can either make or break a company’s reputation among potential customers.
Just a few months ago, a story made the Digg home page about how a customer was conned of a legitimate offer by a Best Buy salesperson. An incident which probably didn’t do any favours for Best Buy PR among Digg readers; possibly with them losing more in future business than they would have if they’d approved the discount.
Someone yesterday posted to the Stuff forums explaining that they’d been refused replacement phone from Carphone Warehouse, despite the phone only being two weeks old. After making contact with The Head of Knowledge Management via Twitter the matter was resolved, allowing the customer to have the phone replaced.
A number of companies have jumped on the Twitter bandwagon, searching for customer complaints and attempting to help them out. When done right, this approach helps both the company to limit bad publicity about them online and the customer to get their issues resolved.
[...] they’re also jumping on the Twitter bandwagon, with their own Twitter [...]