CloudAve wrote an article about Frank Eliason, who spearheaded Comcast's customer care on Twitter (@comcastcares). Read the article here: http://www.cloudave.com/link/can-social-media-customer-care-scale-should-it

The idea is that complaints can be tweeted as replies to @comcastcares, and that would be the channel through which the problem is resolved. This is a great idea, and Comcast executes it well. From the list of people who have gotten customer service this way are Mike Arrington of TechCrunch (http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/06/comcast-twitter-and-the-chicken-tru...), and Zoli Erdos (author of the above CloudAve article). Comcast has received a lot of positive exposure in the blog world for taking this step into Twitter customer care.

The question is if this is scalable. Yes. Yes it is. As the complaints are tweeted in, as long as there is an efficient queuing system whereby incoming requests are then handled as replies to the correct customers, the Twitter presence will work well.

This entry is an essay already, but I want to explain the reasons for the scalability question for those who may be wondering why we are asking. First, Twitter is a broadcast mechanism. All tweets are available to everyone and everyone will tweet back to a single user. Imagine a crowd where the audience is simultaneously complaining to one person. How does that person field each and every question, and how does he maintain context with the askee when answering? Second, that there are millions of Twitter users (growing rapidly). How can Comcast hope to field queries from so many people? My answer to both of these is a good queuing system. This thing has been done before with the phone support (we have all waited 2 hours on the phone for our telecom company). It can be done here again with some intelligent planning. Frank Eliason has done a good job so far with @comcastcares. I am confident he will grow it well.