Basics about Twitter in CallGuide

Twitter is a social medium that can be regarded as a mixture of a blog site and a conversation channel. What is unique is that the limitation for each status update or message is that they can only contain a total of 140 characters, including recipient addresses etc. Twitter messages, or tweets, can be of somewhat different kinds, such as:

• being tagged with a hash # followed by one or more words without a space, to be seen in a flow within a specific subject area.
• being spread quickly when they are re-used by other tweeters, by so-called RT, Retweet.
• mostly being seen by everyone but still be directed som some one or some other tweeters, by a @ character being typed in front of the receivers’ Twitter names, in a so-called Mention.
• Constituting a private conversation between two peoplw, with messages that only these two can see, so-called DM, Direct Messages. It is required that two tweeters follow each other in order for them to be able to send direct messages to each other.

It is not necessary to be familiar with all the rules above as you are provided with some help by a Twitter customised support function in CallGuide Agent. However, at times you must decide whether the conversation can be carried out publically or is better suited as a private conversation.

This is how it may look when the customer writes a Twitter message, or tweet, at http://twitter.com/ via his computer or a smart phone. In the message your organisation’s Twitter username is mentioned, here @golfdeskonline, which makes Telia CallGuide discover the message on the Internet, creating a contact of it. In a system parameter the administrator can also add one or more search criteria that CallGuide shall use for its search.

When a Twitter contact is routed through to an agent, the customer’s earlier Twitter messages are also included, if they exist in CallGuide. How to present old Twitter messages that shall be presented together with the latest message, is ruled by a system parameter in CallGuide Admin.

If the customer, after a concluded contact, later continues to write in the same Twitter thread, a new contact is created.

In CallGuide Agent’s support function you see accepted and sent messages from the time when they were posted at Twitter, with the last message at the top. In order for you to be able to follow the flow more easily, CallGuide also sorts replies to an earlier entry together with the original message, i.e. a recent answer can be found further down in the list.

If a Twitter message has several references, meaning that it is not only aimed at the customer service but has more recipients, these user names are seen in the text, but the reply from the customer service is only sent to the party creating the original message. If a mentioned third party answeers the same message, you see this in the list, but it is grey, meaning that you cannot close or answer this.

The rules there are for Twitter.com also apply in CallGuide Agent. This means i.a. that you may see alert texts generated by Twitter.