Twitter Microbloggin customer service computer-mediated communication
Abstract:
Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) is a form of communication between people with the aid of computers. Recently, CMC technologies, including website, website Q&A tool, electronic mail, weblogs/bulletin boards/forums, online chat windows, etc., have emerged as new technologies for customer service. Among these technologies, Twitter, a popular microblogging tool, has been adopted by various industries to connect to their customers. However, such adoption has received little scholarly attention. This paper takes a step in this direction, seeking to provide understanding of the rationales behind the adoption of Twitter for customer service and the user preferences of using the technology for such service. Case studies were conducted with companies that are currently using the technology to connect to their customers and user surveys were carried out among Twitter users to gather their preferences towards using it for customer service. The results show that a variety of reasons exist for the adoption of Twitter by companies and users rank Twitter fairly low as a customer service technology as compared to other CMC technologies. Therefore, there seems to be a misconnection between the widespread adoption of Twitter by companies and the overall low rankings of the technology by Twitter users.
