Supporting our Customers

Nowadays there is a lot of discussion going on about Twitter, a 'new' micro blogging tool that keeps the web 2.0 community busy. As you are interested in the web and weblogs this might not surprise for you ;-)

Looking at it from some distance I can distinguish 3 groups of people using this Twitter.

First and largest group is 'the community', people twittering around, giving some insights in how they spend their day and sharing more or less interesting information like photo's or other content.

The next group is the content-providing companies like  BBC and  The New York Times.  More and more they find Twitter as additional stream to inform 'the world', replacing the email alerts they used to send to give a quick update to the community.

Group 3 are the service providers who use Twitter as service tool to their customers. For example Southwest Airlines is informing their customers on flight information.
I also see some companies starting to use twitter as a way of open-door for service related questions. 
In the past we used to call this the reception desk but in a globalizing world it has been replaced by web-based tools.   Starting with mail, followed by MSN/Chat and now we seem to have set the next step Twitter.  

There is a lot of movement in this area and because of this growing demand, large enterprises are starting to build Twitter-like features in their enterprise applications  (we are testing Ora*Tweet). Ideally you would like to connect your business applications to this communication instuments to automate sending info and capturing/routing incomming messages.

A lot of work ahead for the tech-guys and a lot of new ideas to be explored for the business innovators.....

In this post I was wondering if WE@Oracle Support can be of better service if we would open en service-twitter channel (in parallel with MetaLink and the phone) for catching user-questions... 
Looking forward to your suggestions.

Hans

http://twitter.com/hwiggerm