Twitter has transformed our ability to get customer service from big companies.
Instead of calling a toll-free number and waiting on hold or sending an e-mail and waiting days for an often irrelevant boilerplate response, you can just post a public query to the company on Twitter and wait for a
response to roll in from a service representative or even a helpful bystander who sees the message on the social network.
It works great for some questions, such as “When is Flight 615 supposed to land in Chicago?” But for more complicated problems, like, say, rerouting a ticket or sorting out an overcharge on an account, Twitter is just too clunky.
A lot of information is too sensitive to be posted publicly on Twitter, so both sides typically have to follow each other so they can send direct messages back and forth. And each message is limited to Twitter’s 140-character length. That’s a lot of pecking and sending, especially on a mobile phone.
Now a Vancouver company called Hootsuite Media is about to come out with a solution that combines the benefits of Twitter’s speed and public posting with the personalized service of a phone call.
When you tweet to a company with a complex problem, the company can tweet back a custom link that only works from your Twitter account. When you click on the link, you get a special phone number or Skype ID so you can directly connect to someone who can handle your question or problem.
“It takes that social out of the open conversation and brings it into a phone call in a one-to-one manner,” said Ryan Holmes, chief executive of Hootsuite, in an interview.
He said that shifting the conversation to a call helps the company avoid a litany of negative public tweets from a disgruntled customer and gets the customer faster, better service, making both sides happier.
Hootsuite’s namesake product allows both individuals and institutions to manage a broad range of social media accounts from a single web console or smartphone app. Its basic version is free, and I have long used it to help me post articles and links on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. The paid versions include access to additional applications and analytic tools.
The new tweet-to-call technology was developed by Zeetl, a Hootsuite contractor, but Mr. Holmes said he liked it so much that he decided to acquire the start-up. Hootsuite has been testing the service internally and with a few customers and intends to offer it more widely very soon, he said.
The Zeetl purchase fits neatly within Hootsuite’s ambition to build a simple, versatile set of social media tools — easy enough for an individual user to figure out, but robust enough for a big company’s social media team that might need to handle thousands of messages every day and monitor scores of accounts across a dozen social networks.
“We know at the end of the day, customers want an easy-to-use experience, whether they are an individual or enterprise user,” he said. “Historically, enterprise software has been kludgy and too crowded with features.”
While Mr. Holmes is quick to point to his company’s triple-digit growth rates in recent quarters, he’s much more reluctant to provide more meaningful numbers — like, say, revenue.
Hootsuite claims more than 1,600 enterprise customers and more than 10 million users, but it’s unclear how many are using a paid version of the service. The company has certainly been expanding, doubling from 300 to more than 600 employees over the last year, and it is one of Canada’s shiniest tech companies these days, as once-bright gems like BlackBerry have lost their luster.
To bolster future growth, including an expansion of tools to allow businesses to buy and track advertising on various social networks, Hootsuite announced Thursday that it has raised $60 million in an undisclosed mix of equity and debt financing, raising its total funding since founding to $250 million.
In addition to a “large Boston-based asset manager” (reported to be Fidelity Investments), three previous Hootsuite investors joined in the funding round: Accel Partners, Insight Venture Partners and Omers Ventures, an arm of the Ontario municipal employees’ pension fund. Silicon Valley Bank is funding the debt portion of the deal.
Mr. Holmes has said previously that he wants to build Hootsuite into a company worth more than $1 billion and eventually take it public. Did the latest round of funding achieve the first part of that goal?
“We more than doubled our valuation since the last round,” he said coyly. That round, which occurred in August of last year, raised $165 million for the company. Although the company declined to comment on its valuation at that time, various publications estimated it at between $500 million and $1 billion.
So maybe he has hit his target and is on the way to that public offering. Mr. Holmes, how about sending me one of those personal tweet-to-call links and letting me know offline?