Yo Twitter, does the phrase 'eating one's own dog food' mean anything?

April 23rd, 2010 § 2 comments

Some weeks ago I had what to me was a serious issue. The two Twitter clients I use, Digsby and Mahtweets, weren’t connecting to Twitter. After troubleshooting for a bit, I got a bit paranoid and went into Twitter.com to change my password – just in case.

So I go through the change password steps, click on ‘Change’ and get an error. Something about an error with my profile. Try again, same error. Wait a while and return to it, still borked. Ok, now I’m really worried.

Hit up Twitter’s help link, prominently placed in the menu bar at the top and the bottom of the pages. It took me to a Googlesque search page. Tried a few queries, none that addressed my issue. Browsed their knowledge base for a bit, and got to the Known Issues page. Nope, nothing there.

Now, the thing about having a Known Issues page is that it signifies to me that I can submit an issue. That and the fact that there is a ‘Check your Existing Requests’ tab on the page. So now I search intently for a way to submit a request, and I can’t find one. Thinking I must be going blind – surely, SURELY there’s a place somewhere to do it – I spend about 1/2 an hour just looking for that. I even manage to find a past request I submitted last year listed under ‘Solved and closed requests’. No idea how I managed to do that – it was either a miracle, or they have made massive changes to the support system.

On to the final step – when all avenues have been exhausted, send the company an e-mail. Hit up the contact page, and the Customer Support link takes you back to their Help section. E-mail addresses listed there for Partners, Press and Law Enforcement, nothing for the pesky user with issues.

If this were ANY other product, I woulda ranted about it on Twitter upon exhausting all avenues. So I did, thinking, hoping, someone at Twitter would see it and get back to me. Nothing, nada, no response. Not that day, not in the following days.

What of the issue? I tried to change my password more than a week later, and the process worked.

So why am I bitching about it now?
Well, I’ve been thinking about it a lot. And I can’t let it go. It bugs me. It bugs me that I spent SOOOO much time trying to get help and I couldn’t find a single piece of information to aid the situation. It bugs me that I could see Troubleshooting topics started recently, but I couldn’t find an obvious way to start one. It bugs me that there might be people out there new to Twitter or long-time users slightly more n00b than I having issues and not getting the help they need. I understand their frustration.

And most of all, it bugs me that these days it’s almost a requirement for other companies to monitor Twitter as part of their customer support/care strategy. We call companies out who aren’t up to date with customer feedback coming in on Twitter, or those who don’t respond adequately. And Twitter seems to get away with not doing exactly that.

I was at Evan Williams’ SXSW keynote, where he spoke about being as open and transparent as possible both within and without the company. In my line of work, that means listening and responding to customers. In this context, it means monitoring Twitter for cries of help and reaching out. Not an easy task by any means, but one that needs to be done nevertheless.

So Twitter, hows about that dog food?

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§ 2 Responses to Yo Twitter, does the phrase 'eating one's own dog food' mean anything?"

  • David Johnston says:

    Good points here, Dek. The trouble is that there’s a flood of info flowing through twitter and other sites, (facebook etc) there’s no real interest in the administrators of the sites to keep any customer service. We are only “customers” in the sense that we use the sites, pay zero, although expect great service. This is why user pays is a possible solution. If some small fee was associated, these sites would have consumer legislation and law all over them. It’s the wild wild west at the moment, or the wilder exotic east , if you’ve been China hacked… Use protection. Get fire walls. Wear a condom. Wear a raincoat. Don’t play on the freeway. Take care people!

  • dekrazee1 says:

    I understand what you’re saying, but to say that we shouldn’t expect any service because we’re not paying customers is a one sided argument. Twitter is where it is, the darling of the industry, precisely because its customers use it and bring ither customers into it. It is ultimately a two way relationship and we can’t discount customer service just because customers don’t pay for a service which is *offered* for free.

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