I agree: acknowledging a ticket that may not be solved immediately really makes a difference. Customers appreciate the fact that you’re aware of their issue and have a plan to resolve it.

I’m kind of down on auto-responders myself–they actually leave me feeling a bit cold. The ones I’ve experienced (see my post on Boxbe customer support) were thrown in as hurdles, in that you had to actually read through it and email a *second* address if you really wanted your request to be reviewed. If you ignored it, as one might for an auto-response, you’d never hear back. I feel personally, that the first reply to the customer should be instructions on how to solve the issue.

Twitter is an interesting medium. I find it tricky to provide great support in < 140 characters, yet customers do demand instant, comprehensive responses. I'm curious about how best to manage expectations within that medium.

If a company encourages me to contact them via twitter, I expect to hear back in a much shorter amount of time – within an hour or two. Recently I tweeted a question to my hosting company about the server being offline, and they never got back to me. Incredibly bad customer service, and in a public forum.

On the flip side, I also work at a software helpdesk. When a new ticket is assigned to me, I make a point to acknowledge it within the hour, even if it is just to say that I’m working on the issue. My experience has been that users are more patient if you are upfront about what is going on: contacting the software team, the responsible person is out of the office until tomorrow, etc.

hope it helps!
– liz

I’m always impressed by the opportunity that Twitter search brings with regard to things like this. I’m pretty sure some of the clients for Twitter enable you to track timelines for keyword searches for “Basecamp” for example.

Do you have anything like that set up for PollDaddy?