Fortune Favors the Tweeting

The time: Late morning.

The scene: E-mail servers unresponsive - probably down.

The players: Co-workers hungry for information - and resolution.

The first IM flashed urgently on my desktop: Outlook wasn't able to connect to our email server. One quick check into my own Outlook confirmed the problem.

Time to call Crystal Tech, our e-mail hosting company. I envisioned long minutes of having to navigate through an automated phone maze. But I couldn't get through - their phone number wasn't even ringing. I figured I wasn't the only client calling in that morning. So I checked out their website's Live Chat. No luck there either - the pop-up window politely informed me that there were 107 people ahead of me, and that I'd be waiting for a while.

What to do? 

Hearing my laments, one of my co-workers suggested I tweet about it - advice we often give to our own clients! At first, I was skeptical - what's my one tweet gonna do? Clearly I wasn't the only one trying to connect with them. My comment would just go unnoticed, lost forever in the Twitterverse.

Not so.

Within the hour, a Crystal Tech rep replied to me - a short note indicating that they were working to resolve the problem and linking me to a forum update on the outage. Two back-and-forth tweets later, she also informed me that they're going to figure out what caused the issue and send an update on that, as well.

Soon thereafter, our email was working fine.

Outages are to be expected - technology is imperfect. But I applaud Crystal Tech for not only starting an update feed on their website, but also monitoring Twitter for customer complaints. They just moved themselves up another notch on my "Hey-They're-A-Pretty-Good-Vendor" list.

Taking the time to communicate with individual customers in real time... well, here's to one more satisfied customer. And Twitter? Proving its value yet again.

- By Tatiana Rutledge