One question that I get from a multitude of web hosts is, “Are there any alternative methods to tech support that you know of?”. With everybody doing the standard e-mail, help desk and live chat support, people are looking for an alternative to give them an edge over the competition.
After sitting here and giving it some thought, I thought about the things I check on a day to day basis and one solution stuck out like a sore thumb screaming for attention. Twitter would make for an excellent web host to client conversation tool.
If you want to see an example Twitter page, check out my own.
How Would it Work?
For example, lets say I start up the Web Hosting Show web hosting company. I could tell all of my clients to go subscribe to my Twitter RSS or follow me on Twitter to get announcements about server upgrades, downtime and other notifications people would like to be tuned into.
The nice thing about Twitter is that you don’t have a lot of room to write – so each update would be quick and to the point. This saves time for the web host as far as writing it goes and the client as far as getting updates on any issues at hand.
Twitter Tools
Twitter has a handful of helpful publishing tools as well that would make updating it an easy task too. Some of those include:
- TwitBin – Send and view tweets from within the Firefox browser.
- TwitThis – Tool to allow visitors to your site to easily share a page Twitter.
- TwitBox – View and submit tweets, see replies and direct messages, delete your own tweets, and multiple account support.
Check out more on this list of Twitter tools I ran across on Mashable.com.
As you can see, this would be a quick and easy tool to work into your support pages – and you wouldn’t exactly have to be locked into Twitter either. There are many Twitter clones out there that might actually even have a few more bells and whistles too. With hosting support it is always good to think outside the box, and Twitter provides a unique tool that could help you provide your customers with a very different hosting experience.
