Mike’s post on Frank Eliason, Comcast’s Twitter Man, provided some real food for thought.

A trap into which a lot of marketers fall is viewing any media as a tool to talk at customers. While social media is a communication tool, many seem to forget that communication in a social or community setting is a two-way activity, a conversation. Frank’s true genius may be that he started with the listening part rather than the talking part. Some of the early press accounts of his efforts identify his first step as monitoring (read that listening to) customer feedback on blogs and Twitter. It was kind of like running a focus group from hell with thousands of people, all of whom can listen to everyone else and add their complaints.

Customer Service Took  Nap

Comcast’s customer satisfaction probably hit a low point a couple of years ago with the posting on YouTube of the video entitled “A Comcast Technician Sleeping on My Couch.”  I purposely have not linked to the video because the compassionate side of me believes they have suffered enough. Anyway, Frank’s work was just one part of a company-wide effort to improve service quality perceptions. Comcast and all cable companies have generally gained pretty miserable, and well-deserved customer service reputations. In his book The Ultimate Question, customer loyalty and Net Promoter guru Fred Reichheld summed up the cable industry customer service model with “Customers are rarely enthusiastic when they have limited choice — and anyway, many local cable companies have ratcheted up prices while providing mediocre service.” Sounds like the service model of a few banks and credit card companies we know.

When people say your product’s crap, you can either tell them to shut up or fix the product.

Comcast apparently chose the latter. You can see it on the street: cleaner trucks, cleaner (and more rested) technicians, less reliance on contractors to handle service calls, and even greater use of a little orange cones behind the parked truck. Damn near phone company like.

So while we wouldn’t attribute all of Comcast’s customer satisfaction turnaround to Frank’s tweets, he has played a big part. He listened. And rather than trying to shout down the disgruntled mob, he took the novel approach of engaging them individually and trying to solve their problem. For those he touched it appears to have been a more satisfying and memorable experience than working through an endless automated menu to reach an disinterested call center half way around the world. Frank engaged them in a conversation not a marketing monologue, 140 characters at a time. You might give it a try.

Later.

So after I posted this a couple weeks ago I kept wondering if this could really be true.  How could Comcast really credit Twitter for improving its customer satisfaction by 9% in Q1?  Really?  Seriously?  You gotta be kidding me!

Well you’ll have to excuse me because I didn’t know about this guy.  Frank Eliason, or “Comcast’s Twitter Man” as headlined in this BusinessWeek.com article.

Fascinating stuff about how Comcast is using Twitter to solve customer problems and Frank is a true rockstar and innovator.

But as I read it I kept wondering…is Frank really just the lone guy bailing water relentlessy at the back of the big sinking ship?  Is good Twittering strictly limited to improving customer service only?

Or can companies effectively use social media like Twitter to actually plug those holes?  To fix the processes and mistakes that are causing all of the leaks to begin with? Can they take the information they’re gathering from Twitter and change how they do things?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m impressed by Frank.  But I’ll be really impressed when somebody figures that out.

I think we marketers are all in the discovery phase of how to effectively use social media marketing to build brands.  It’s just not something that there’s much history with yet.

But I will say this…if Comcast is crediting Twitter with helping increase its customer satisfaction rate by 9% in the first quarter, then that should make all of us stand up and take notice.  Especially considering that “improved customer satisfaction” and “cable companies” rarely appear in the same sentence.