Yammer, Twitter, and Customer Service

Twitter is a micro-blogging application that allows you to reach subscribers (called "Followers" in Twitter) with short messages of up to 140 characters. When you have a Twitter account, you can follow whoever interests you and you receive anything they say.

Yammer is similar to Twitter, but it's designed to work within your work domain. It doesn't have as strict a limit on post length and a number of other features Twitter doesn't have. (In fairness, some of those features are useful inside the firewall, but might not translate outside.)

Either way, your micro-blogging system of choice, internally or externally, can be a useful extension of your customer support ticket system.

Imagine a world in which you can call customer service and enter a trouble ticket, then hang up and automatically receive notifications via Twitter or Yammer every time the status of your ticket changes. Depending on the ticketing system, this functionality already exists.

The concept is simple. When you get a confirmation e-mail back about your ticket, it can contain a link that allows you to subscribe to the customer service feed. Every time the status of your ticket changes, you receive a notification via Twitter or Yammer indicating your new ticket status and including a link to the ticket system's web interface. The technical details at this point aren't important. Perhaps the URL sent in the message could log you into the customer support system and take you to the ticket for which the status changed. Or it could take you to the list of your tickets where tickets with new status are highlighted.

Either way, you would be able to track status of your tickets without calling the customer service line, which takes your time and theres for an exercise that usually adds little to no value.

Conversely, if you check your feed for notices and there are none, you can call customer service and pursue a more timely solution to your problem.

What's WordPress.org?

In the world outside your company's four walls, WordPress and Blogger are the two primary blogging sites most people use. WordPress has one important difference: it allows you to download the blogging environment for free and install it on your corporate Intranet server. In other words, it allows you to build a blog for your own internal use.

When you use this version of WordPress (Wordpress.org), you can select from a plethora of plug-ins that can help you extend the usefulness of your blog. As I mentioned in the previous post, we use something called Subscribe2 that allows users to subscribe to the blog and receive e-mail messages when a new message is posted. The number of plug-ins is as varied as the needs of the people who use WordPress.

WordPress.org is an open source product. In other words, you get the programming for free and you can build your own plug-ins based on your needs. It's sort of like of Microsoft were to make Word's source code available to the world and let people build their own enhancements.

The advantage of hosting the blog software yourself is enormous. Your organization can have a professional blogging backbone within your firewall for free. On the other hand, your IT organization will have to install and maintain the software.

WordPress or any other blogging software makes it easy for you to render posts written in basic HTML. If you want to go beyond what the text editor allows, though, such as adding tables, you need to write the tables in HML. (It's really not that hard. Just Google HTML reference.)

Blogging on the Intranet

First of all, if you haven't seen it, hurry on over to the Virtual Writer's Group to look over my series about blogging using Blogger.

We've started an internal WordPress.org blog at work. In it, my department can get its message out to a diverse audience across my firm's entire US population without requiring them to go looking.

A blog's a great way to help your internal users engage with your group. Ideally, if your workplace is RSS-enabled, you don't have to e-mail your users about what's going on. They can subscribe to your blog and all the updates show up in their feed reader (more on that in some future posts). Internet Explorer 7 includes an embedded feed reader.

Even if you aren't RSS-enabled Word Press has a plug-in called Subscribe2 that allows your users to receive e-mail messages when you update the blog.

Why blog? In many companies, it's hard to get the core information on the Intranet updated. In our case, our Portal team has done an outstanding job creating our Intranet. It's easy to use and well-organized, but to get something changed requires an expenditure of time and resources, and in our current economic state, both are scarce.

Our blog allows us to own the means to update our users on important issues without requiring us to schedule updates weeks ahead of time. It puts our users a giant step closer to us and the information we can provide them, while still allowing enough of a barrier to assure we can do our jobs, as well as helping our users.

More on WordPress and its usage for internal blogging in the next post.