Can Twitter Deliver? Can You?

Jun 9th, 2008 Written By Cheryl Smith

If you’re in business, you’ve heard the phrase “under promise, over deliver” more times than you can probably count. After a particularly poor customer service experience at a Chinese restaurant, I even explained the concept to my 10-year old son. The ability to exceed a customer’s expectation(s) is a vital aspect of providing superior customer service. The topic is one component of CultureSmith Consulting’s half-day workshop, Select Squared.

Late last night Twitter made a huge promise on their blog. With the opening of Apple’s 2008 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) and Steve Jobs’ highly anticipated keynote address, (and possible new iphone announcement), Twitter is expecting ten times the traffic today on their site. Given the fact that Twitter has had dramatic downtime over the last few months, they’ve “made some plans to accommodate this dramatic surge.”

They’ve also set some pretty high expectations for reliability in the minds of users across the twitterverse. Time will tell if they have under promised and can over deliver. Or if the reverse is true. I hope they can pull it off!

I have really come to value Twitter as a business resource. I can’t say that I’ve come to “rely” on it completely, due to the aforementioned downtime. But I really want to!

When is the last time you were pleasantly surprised by customer service? How do your customers want you to succeed? Have you set the bar too high for your own organization and left your customers with unrealistic expectations of your ability to deliver?

admin

Check out http://tinyurl.com/54yavy for a more technical side of the story from @BethHarte.
http://www.pauldettman.com Paul Dettman

So many of these sites eventually become a victim of their own success, mainly due to the fact that the owners do not have the experience to run large-scale infrastructures. They are often college kids with a great idea and little else. Something that Jaiku will benefit from is the vast experience of Google, and Jaiku have limited invitations while they get their hardware right. Twitter keeps falling over so often it simply is not a ‘business tool’, it’s just a fun thing.

I am very keen to see if tools like Twitter can be brought into the enterprise. The first step is to have a licensed server which a company can install in-house, to avoid the usual security issues.

I favour Twitter, Pownce etc. over email because they prevent spam and I know my boss won’t contact me :)

One of my current ideas involves how newly empowered ‘knowledge workers’ collaborate across the boundaries of companies. Until now, only email or a physical meeting were the options. But I think something like Pownce, which has basic agenda management and large file support, could really help inter-company teams with a wide geographical spread to work better. The only thing is: when will a genuine B2B firm offer such a service?
http://www.pauldettman.com/ Paul Dettman

So many of these sites eventually become a victim of their own success, mainly due to the fact that the owners do not have the experience to run large-scale infrastructures. They are often college kids with a great idea and little else. Something that Jaiku will benefit from is the vast experience of Google, and Jaiku have limited invitations while they get their hardware right. Twitter keeps falling over so often it simply is not a 'business tool', it's just a fun thing.

I am very keen to see if tools like Twitter can be brought into the enterprise. The first step is to have a licensed server which a company can install in-house, to avoid the usual security issues.

I favour Twitter, Pownce etc. over email because they prevent spam and I know my boss won't contact me :)

One of my current ideas involves how newly empowered 'knowledge workers' collaborate across the boundaries of companies. Until now, only email or a physical meeting were the options. But I think something like Pownce, which has basic agenda management and large file support, could really help inter-company teams with a wide geographical spread to work better. The only thing is: when will a genuine B2B firm offer such a service?

Can Twitter Deliver? Can You?

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