article: When Angie Konrad tweeted that the heating was switched off on her train, she did not expect the operators of that line to read the message and alert the driver to switch the heating on so she could enjoy the rest of her journey in comfort. Twitter is enabling companies to engage in a much warmer relationship with their clientele, but when things go wrong for the customer, it is also the best way to get grievances resolved quickly and in real time says comedian David Schneider, who is also a Twitter expert and runs social media consultancy That Lot. "If you're 29th in the queue on a phone call, only you know that. It's you and the person who's keeping you on hold. But if you tweet, it's public and it could be picked up, and I think companies are very aware of that," says Mr Schneider. Or catch up on BBC iPlayer A bad review or negative comment can be retweeted by millions, and companies are often keen to defuse customer anger very quickly in a public space such as Twitter. If it is done cleverly, it can even work in a company's favour. "I remember there was a time where there was an outage on O2 on the network and they were getting a hell of a lot of bad press," says Mr Schneider. "People were tweeting very aggressively at the O2 account and about O2 - it was trending. "They happened to have a very skilful, self-deprecating, humorous person on their Twitter feed at that time who dealt with the abuse in a very amusing way." Mr Schneider says it was interesting to see a wave of criticism turn to positive comments from the customers. When a complaint is treated with a personal touch, it can even go viral on Twitter. For instance one Argos customer service representative chose to reply to customer Immy "Badman" Bugti's complaint using the same street style he had used in his tweet. A shortened version of the messages read: "@Argos_online: Yo, wen you gettin' da ps4 tings in moss side? Ain't waitin' no more." "@BadManBugti: Safe Badman. We gettin' sum more PS4 tings in wivin da next week, y'get me." The company response from Argos was retweeted over 1,500 times within the space of a few hours. Jo Causon, chief executive of the Institute of Customer Service, says consumers are becoming much more savvy and expect organisations to relate to them as real life human beings and not simply transactions any more. "One of the key things that we're seeing in the changing world we're all living in is that we want to have better dialogue, not just monologue, with our organisations," says Ms Causon. According to a poll of 2,000 people by the communications agency Fishburn Hedges and Echo Research in April 2012, 36% of people had used a social media platform to contact a big company and 65% said it was a better way than call centres to get in touch with companies. It was not just confined to the
summary: There was a time when a strongly worded letter was the only means of having your complaint heard by a company, but is tweeting now the best way to get your gripe to the front of the queue?