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I had a question about Microsoft Office.
It wasn’t too complicated, but the answer was a bit elusive. I decided to tag Microsoft Office on Twitter, and someone helped me within about five minutes. A similar support question came up with Flipboard, and their team was also quick to respond.
In some ways, it makes sense that tech support would occur in real-time on social media. We’re all busy. We don’t have time to look up a support site or create a help desk ticket. We don’t like making phone calls (they take too much time). Email is worthless because there is so much back and forth.
The problem with using social media for support, however, is that the answers and assistance fall into an eternal abyss of nothingness. I don’t have that support message from the Office team anymore and I’m not even sure how to find it.
That’s where companies like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook could help.
I could see a new tab or features related to support that somehow gather my questions and resolutions, that basically provide one place to look for help. I could even do searches on existing issues, find companies easily, rate their services, and help other users as well. It’s a free-for-all at the moment, where I mostly send and receive direct messages on Twitter and hope for the best.
With some effort, social media companies could do much more.
I also thought about a third-party doing this. Maybe it already exists (if you know, post on my Twitter feed), but I’d use an app that organized all of my support messages from all platforms, categorizing them and saving them for future use. One example of this: I recently had an issue with an Xbox game. A free promo code seemed to work at first, but the game was not available. Yet, the promo code had expired. I tried a support chat but the person didn’t know what to do and then tried email — that didn’t pan out, either. Yet, it’s all private. No one else sees the questions, so no one else can chime in. The app I’m picturing is a combination of a support ticket with Quora and a community chat channel of some kind.
Call it Social Support if you want. Actually, call it anything — if you happen to make something like that, let us all know.
Of course, there are huge challenges here.
Facebook is a private, self-contained network and accessing the chat is next to impossible. Twitter is more open but also less organized and chaotic. It’s a free for all so it’s hard to know what is actually a support question. This is where machine learning would have to play a role, and that’s expensive to build and complex.
Yet, I want to be an end-user of something like that.
I tag a company, they respond and so do a few users, and it’s all saved for later use. Anytime I want to go see resolved issues (or look into them again and try to resolve them), it’s all right there. Can someone build it? Please?
