Posted on by Esteban Kolsky

State of Social Customer Service (Twitter Custom Timeline)

I will admit, this would not make a post traditionally – but I wanted to test a Twitter Custom Timeline.

I built one after a conversation I had with Martin Hill-Wilson (one of the sharpest, if not the sharpest, people in the  forward frontiers of Social Customer Service; read his book; follow him on Twitter).

Here is the custom timeline, comments welcome underneath as always.  BTW. remember that Twitter is read from bottom to top – wish they had a setting to change that – #LeSigh.

(now, back to digital transformation; another post coming tomorrow)

edited post publication

After posting i realized the potential use for this “tool” (custom timelines).

It is true you cannot reorganize the tweets in a specific way – but with proper planning, this can become a Twitter FAQ/KM tool for organizations.  Here is the first pass at a process to do so:

  1. Create a private Twitter Account just to build these lists
  2. Plan what your FAQ should be, and the process to update them as necessary (life changes, your customers will ask different questions over time). Nothing worse than an outdated FAQ.
  3. Write the tweets you need to direct your customers to existing resources that will answer their questions or concerns.
  4. Use your Customer Service solution to
    1. monitor for specific phrases, keywords, questions
    2. provide an automatic answer to those customers with a link to the specific timeline that answers them
    3. monitor responses to your timeline account to pick up follow ups
    4. follow up to new questions, if necessary, via your existing accounts – not the timeline account (need to keep the tweetstream clean for timelines – this is crucial for maintenance).
  5. Monitor, report, improve your FAQs

Congratulations, first step towards using Twitter properly for triage – want to try it?

Let me know what you think and how this can be improved — straw man idea right now…