Use The Twitter, Luke

Immediately after posting yesterday’s decision to abandon the MacBook Air, I let the good folks on Twitter know about it. And, no more than a minute after tweeting, AppleCare called to talk. At 8:30 PM on a Sunday!

What the?

I must ascribe this to awesome coincidence, as at no time did either of us mention Twitter on the call. I’m not as fortunate as Michael Arrington to have attracted the attention of a Comcast VP in Philadelphia from his twittering in San Francisco.

Yet, the response was immediate, and at an awfully odd time. Wouldn’t it be great if companies monitored twitter like they do blogs, and resolve customer problems before they spiral out of control? It’s a nice thought.

But I have no proof, so I must assume coincidence.

Anyway, I had written an email on Friday that was the stated reason for the call, and I talked to the rep briefly about returning the Air, which required another call on Monday to coordinate with the Sales team. I set up a time and went back to my computer.

Where, in turn, I received an invitation to join the TUAW Sunday Night Talkcast to talk about my MacBook Air issues.

Wow, The Twitter is really something!

I accepted, and had an engaging time with the TUAW panel. You can hear the results on TUAW or in iTunes, whenever episode #37 comes out. I’ll be in at about the 10 minute mark.

Hopefully, I don’t sound like too much of a dork. We’ll find out in a few days, I guess!

I wanted to make this point last night, and I’ll make it again here: this is not an issue with Apple’s customer service. Having experience managing customer service teams, I found little fault with the behavior of the AppleCare reps. Most of them strived for resolution on the first call, and were willing to work extremely hard to help me diagnose and resolve the problem. My suspicions that this is a problem beyond their ability to solve would sadly be borne out today, which I’ll describe in the next (and hopefully last) post on this matter.

The point of this post is that you never know what a new technology will bring. If you ask me why I use Twitter, it’s an easy response: so my (non-twittering) friends around the country can see what and how I’m doing.

But the side effects are pretty cool, too.