Followbase – customer service portal or global vendor user-group?

Billed as ‘Customer Service and Support via Twitter’ but this looks like a Killer App in the making.

Until very recently it was quite difficult for customers and prospects, and indeed vendors and suppliers, to find out about issues real-time. The call-centre has been the familiar solution, especially in the B2C market, but these were easily overloaded. It has been difficult for consumers to group together to bring pressure to bear, although user-groups exist in some areas.

Now, Followbase looks like a game-changing alternative with universal access and visibility in real-time.

Every vendor or supplier should take note of this application and prepare! Customer Service, Product Development, Product Management, Marketing, Sales, you name it, this application has the potential to redraw the rules for each department and function very quickly. Clue – There’s an ‘Are you (Company XXX)? Claim this Forum’ button.

Why is this a Killer App?

Followbase already has over 100 forums for organisations set-up. Companies like McDonalds, Sony, Amex, Microsoft, Zoho, Rackspace, VodafoneUK, British Airways and Tweetdeck, to pick one from each current category. Hopefully these organisations are monitoring the tweet-streams and have processes and resources in place to deal with them.

For each organisation there are 4 tabs in Followbase:

• Mentions – every tweet with a relevant @ included. Potentially a lot of noise – currently quite a lot of promotional tweets are being picked up, for example.
• Ideas – a place for suggestions, ideas, feedback etc. and a source of real-time market research for product marketing and similar folks.
• Problems – a place for people to raise issues and express their dissatisfaction and something that customer services should be picking up.
• Questions – somewhere to seek information, or to raise concerns, so these could be filtered to sales, marketing, product management or elsewhere in the organisation.

Categorisation of Tweets into the different tabs at the moment is a bit random but user education to make use of # hashtags should help as the system takes off.

I’ll wager that in 3 months time we’ll all be very familiar with Followbase.

How long before you take a look? Goto www.followbase.com

Mark.