customer support on twitter (anecdotes)

Further to IBF's and others' musings on using Twitter for an aftersales/customer service channel, here are some anecdotal comments taken from the BNM (Brighton New Media) mailing list. The demographic of the list is naturally early-adopter-oriented, but these anecdotes demonstrate the comparative (or at least percieved) effectiveness of twitter vs. telephone support:

For those with BT Broadband woes, myself (and others on this list I've
noticed) have recently been helped by the social media pixies on twitter,
@btcare.
A quick moan about BT services on there and they'll message you back and
seem to get the problem sorted quicker than through the usual channels.

I found the same with Quark - when I had moaned all morning on twitter about installation and wrong codes blah blah I had a message from a bod in California who had it sorted in an hour! Tech eventually got back to me 3 days later by conventional methods...

I get IntelliJ, Grails, and Tapestry support via twitter. All you have
to do is mention an issue you're facing and somebody (often the authors)
will jump at the chance to help.

Really useful!

Thanks BNMers (again).