December 7, 2009
Kevin has started his first in a series of posts around customizing Dovetail Carrier. Good stuff! I’m looking forward to the rest of his series.
November 5, 2009
The impact of social media on business has far reaching effects and in all directions. Consumers around the globe share their opinions about products with anyone, anywhere. The popular digital playground Twitter recognized the impact of digital media on the marketplace so much that they now offer a vehicle for companies to see what consumers say about their products. This trend is not going to recede, but broaden and expand.How does the influence of social media guide and direct the customer service and support industry? Are there ways to mitigate damaging “tweets”? How about capitalize on positive blog posts?We'd love to hear what you think, so leave a comment below.
April 6, 2009
Notifications and escalations generated by Rulemanager are an integral component of the Clarify/Dovetail system. Traditionally, email and in-application notifications are the most common notification delivery mechanisms. Digital pagers were popular years ago, but are pretty much non-existent today. With mobile devices (iPhones, Windows Mobile, BlackBerrys, etc.) becoming almost ubiquitous, we can look to using these devices for notification delivery. And they all share a common communication platform - SMS. SMS (Short Message Service) is commonly referred to as text messaging. So let's look at how we can use SMS as a delivery mechanism. A while back, I detailed how to use Twitter as a notification channel, and then use Twitter to send SMS messages. If we don't want to be coupled to a service like Twitter (which doesn't have guaranteed delivery, SLAs, etc.), we can use a very similar process, but instead…
May 5, 2008
Kevin had an earlier post discussing how Rulemanager could fire a script that would notify all queue members via Twitter when a case is dispatched to a queue. The script took the queue name as an input, queried the database for the queue members, and then sent a direct Twitter message to each queue member.I liked what he did, and wanted to see if we could take it a step further, and make it more in line with Rulemanager notifications.Making Twitter a first class Notification methodRuleManager already knows how to resolve queue members into individual users, and it knows how to resolve a notification preference of each user, depending on whether the user is on or off work hours, and also based on the urgency of the message.Years ago, many people carried digital pagers, which allowed text messages to be…
April 22, 2008
Quickly after creating a Twitter Integration with Dovetail I ran into rate limiting issues using Twitter's API. Twitter currently only allows 70 requests per hour. Here is their guidance... If you are developing an application that requires more frequent requests to the Twitter API, please contact us and we'll see what we can do. We maintain a white list of known-good screen names who have high-volume API needs. We also suggest researching Jabber/XMPP if your application needs to deliver a near-realtime experience (for example, a bot that replies to direct messages). I emailed Twitter support asking nicely for higher volume API usage but still haven't gotten a response. Then I realized that if we want to release this Dovetail/Twitter integration to our customers we it need to work within the rate limiting guidelines, so I listened to Twitter's guidance and…
Twitter will send direct messages and updates for friends you follow who have notifications turned on to a device. Cool. Better yet a device can be a mobile phone (SMS) or an Instant Messaging account. The goal of this post is to show how to sending and receive messages to Twitter using a Jabber device. To do this we will be using the excellent IM client Digsby which it turns out has excellent Jabber support. Here is what we will be doing. Creating a Jabber ID in Digsby. Adding the Twitter Jabber ID as a contact for your new Jabber ID. Pair your new Jabber ID with your Twitter account. Testing it out. Creating a Jabber ID To create a Jabber ID using Digsby click on Add IM Account in your preferences. Fill in the Jabber Account form and one…
April 15, 2008
I have been doing some work using Twitter as a notification mechanism for case events taking place in Dovetail CRM. I also wanted to expose an API of sorts driven by Twitter direct messages which would allow support agents to work on cases via Twitter. I created a twitter account for Dovetail and went crazy. To the right is a screen shot of my favorite twitter client showing me being notified of a case created by a customer and accepting it via Twitter. This goal of this post is a brain dump what I have learned so far on my journey into Twitterland. Twitter? - what is this Twitter you speak of Twitter is a micro-blogging service on which you can post short messages called tweets. People usually post what they are up to, thinking about, and sadly what clothing…
April 14, 2008
My love for Twitter continues. Or, more precisely, my love of what people are doing with Twitter.The CEO of Zappos wants to talk to more customers - so what does he do? - He selects one of his random followers from Twitter for a free trip to Vegas to meet with him! That rocks!DataGrid offers a $350 rebate to its first 100 followers.Sarah, over at the ReadWriteWeb has a good article on Customer Service via Twitter. What else did I see/learn on Twitter today?Scoble comments that Best Buy is doing some awesome things with social media. Looking to hearing more on this. Since he sat next to Michele Azar, Best Buy VP of Internet Growth, I'm sure we will. (Best Buy is one of our customers, hence the interest)Found out about SalesForce for GoogleAppsGot inspired by the Brains on Fire customer…
April 11, 2008
Becky at the Customers Rock! blog recently detailed the FreshBooks roadtrip, which is a great example of how a company can stay connected with its customers. I love this: This was not a product roadshow. This was a listening tour. I also really like how they're using face-to-face conversations, but also expanding their conversations using a company blog, a roadtrip blog, and Twitter. Awesome.
March 27, 2008
I've been using Twitter a lot lately. For the un-initiated, Twitter is basically micro-blogging. Wikipedia has more details. Or check out a Newbie's guide to Twitter.You can follow me on Twitter.There's many opinions on Twitter, including:"I don't get it""This is brilliant""This seems stupid"Twitter is very new, and all of its usefulness and power is still in its infancy.For me, its super exciting to see how companies are connecting with customers via Twitter - they're Joining the Conversation.What companies? Here's just a few:JetBlueSalesForce.comSouthwestflickrThat rocks!More discussions on companies using TwitterJackie Huba (of Citizens Marketes fame, and also a recent Austin transplant) has a few example of How companies connect using Twitter.Ike Pigott, who specializes in crisis communication, discusses how the American Red Cross is using Twitter as part of their Safe and Well Program.Companies using Twitter as an always available help request…
