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You may as well expect support by spitting and stamping your feet. It is next to impossible to work with a user's issue 140 characters at a time via Twitter. You will have a better experience by emailing a developer so that a more robust trouble-shoot can take place.

DougAdams, on 16 April 2012 - 08:50 AM, said:

Funny, I could have sworn I just read an entire article that made the opposite point.

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And I'm pretty sure that the article concluded by saying that if someone had an issue better suited to be addressed in other channels, they would be directed to such.

Today my area had another comcast outage. I called customer support. After getting through all the prompts to finally get to a live person, that person knew there was an outage, but had no idea why.

I tweeted my disgust that this has been three times this month and within 20 seconds got a tweet back from a @ComcastBill. Within 2 minutes after that, he knew exactly what was wrong and that it was bad enough to move the level to stage 2 (whatever that means).

Now I'm now saying it was fixed any faster, it was an "area" outage, not just my house, but at least he has some info. I have never once called comcast tech support and had that person able to tell me what was wrong other than "there is an outage in your area".

Next story. Last year I had a similar problem with Comcast's phone tech support. Again, I tweeted my disgust. Received a tweet back from @ComcastBonnie. I DM'd her my email address. I had to leave work for the day. I got home and later that night had an email from her that due to my unpleasant experience she was going to discount my bill. I went from paying around $170/month to $112/month, EXACT SAME SERVICE. That was around 2 years ago. My bill went up, to around $130, but I'm nowhere near the $170 I was 2 years ago. Again, same service, nothing changed. Phone tech support is nowhere near as accomodating.

Once I had a hard time getting Flipboard's sharing sheet to work, and omplained about it on Twitter (in ALL CAPS). Someone called @FlopboardCM responded, which surprised me, and got my problem fixed.

himbo, on 16 April 2012 - 09:01 AM, said:

I speak first hand on this. Having poor service from my Internet provider I took to Twitter just to bash them with expletives. In a little while I had a reply from a cust. rep's own business handle on Twitter plus direct lines for more in depth discussion. I've also Googled troubleshooting tips on an HP printer in HP forums. Within the forum a cust rep had commented on the issue plus offered her email and twitter handle for future questions. I've since used her Twitter several times and she was prompt and helpful each time. It works and seems a good model for offering support. Twitter is a great outlet when you get upset and want to sound off. If companies are paying attention they may just save the fractured relationship with their service/product and customer.