Reliability

Twitter is infamous for downtime, if I didn’t know any better I would say it is one of their main features. While the standard user can live with this (and obviously they are) a business cannot. Once you set up a Twitter account for business to connect with the customer it automatically becomes your fault, not Twitter’s, that you aren’t available.  Unfair for customers to think this way? I think not.

Think of it like this, when you buy a tool to do business and that tool breaks down, who does the customer blame? Your business of course, you decided to invest in the tool to provide for your customer, if this tool doesn’t meet your needs for the customer that was a bad decision and is your fault from the customers perspective. If you adopt Twitter as a business tool, you are taking on a responsibility that is out of your control. This is why you need to choose something reliable, something like Friendfeed.

Friendfeed has experienced very minor bouts of downtime and they have always been resolved fairly quickly. You have to expect that every web service will fail at some point in time because 100% uptime is not achievable, so picking the lesser of the two evils is in this aspect, is vital. Friendfeed is definitely the lesser of the two evils and will represent your business better than Twitter.

Discussions

Friendfeed has a very organized way of keeping track of discussions. Simply click on the “my discussions” link and you see every conversation you have participated in. This keeps everything in perspective and doesn’t become a complicated mess of tweets like long support requests can turn into. Keeping things organized is a must for any business and the same goes for social media customer service. Also, Friendfeed does not have a 140 character limit and while most of the time you can get what you want to say in 140 characters, some situations do require more. Friendfeed wins hands down in this arena.

Real-time

Friendfeed updates everything in real-time, the moment someone posts something is the moment you will see it. This is vital. As a business you should be looking at all ways to cut down on expenses and time is the largest expense of them all. Twitter does not automatically update your feed and while you can use a third party application to request tweets automatically, there still exists a certain amount of lag. With Friendfeed, you don’t have to worry about API calls nor refreshing your page waiting for the customer to reply to you. You can simply move on to other support requests and when the customer is once again available you can get right back on track in real-time, another reason why discussions are great for keeping conversations organized.

These three reasons I have stated above I believe are powerful reasons as to why you should use Friendfeed as your social media customer service platform, and this is coming from a heavy advocate of Twitter. How has your business used social media services for CS support? Let your thoughts be heard in the comments.