Twitter, Twitter, Twitter… The world is reeling around this 7 letter word. I even called it as the 9^th wonder in my personal blog. Guess what is the 8^th wonder ? (will tell you at the end of the post). For the unknown, Twitter is a micro blogging site, where you have to give your updates in 140 characters.

Although the concept is simple, the amount of information transfers and viral spread of news has made it in to a virtual world of information. Some even claim it to be the next big thing in public relations and the normal PR would eventually die.

But I am seeing this as the next wave of communication platform, like the email, phone and chat. Twitter has evolved as a communication platform for discussing problems and solutions. Any company, which doesn’t have a social media support is actually looked like primitive company. Nobody would have forgotten the recent Amazon’s  blunder.

As it becoming a communication platform, it eventually becomes a part of a Help Desk. What does an help desk do in an organization? The support people are needed to answer the queries of the customers (be it internal or external). So you need to answer the queries in Twitter too. For example, one of my colleagues caught up with a frustrated user of his product in twitter. He DMed (Direct Messaged, you should know if you are using twitter) and eventually gave good solution to his problem. The customer was happy and that would be the primary work of a help desk.

Knowing this Zen Desk has added a twitter widget to its host of widgets, Salesforce has added Twitter to its service cloud. With Salesforce, you can sync the contacts of Twitter and Salesforce, you can also import the Twitter threads to Salesforce as an request. This sync of data is going to become the seed for the next generation of help desk.  Twitter gives you up to second information and you can’t say that you were not aware of the problem.

There are some companies which are using Twitter to help their customers, like Starbucks, Jet Blue and even Zoho for that matter of fact. I can imagine a day when Twitter becomes the complete help desk solution.

P.S:  The 8^th Wonder, what else than the iPhone. Ah follow me in twitter at www.twitter.com/sylvianpatrick