Online discussions have revolutionized how businesses must serve their current and potential customers. Through savvy tools, companies can monitor what people are saying about their brand, which puts them in a position to have customer service representatives react.

One such tool is a product from Salesforce appropritately named Salesforce for Twitter. An interesting function of this program allows you to automatically turn Twitter mentions (@ replies that include your Twitter handle) into customer service tickets.

Rich Cherecwich explains this well in an article on iMedia Connection: “For example, if a subscriber had a problem with their Comcast service,
they could simply tweet at a Comcast account, and that tweet would be
turned into an active ticket, similar to phoning a corporate call
center.”

If you’ve used any of these products or have others to recommend, we’d love to hear about it.

Additional online monitoring/organization tools worth looking at:

Social Mention

Google Alerts

Hootsuite or TweetDeck

Twitter Search