Imagine the feeling of receiving a Tweet early one morning from a customer, raising a support question. On stage, in front of the whole world.

I'm glad that we noticed the twitter and could respond

I was even happier that the issue got resolved. You can look it up the details on Twitter.

It got me thinking, again along the lines of Consulting and Professional Services 2.0, what would a "big" outsourcing company have done in this circumstance?

The following thoughts came to mind:

"Sorry sir, Twitter is not a valid channel for you to raise your support calls to us, according to section x y z of the agreement, to match the SLA we need you to fill in a form etc etc"

You can guess the rest of the story (if they actually knew what Twitter was in the first place!).

The natural feel I have is this - my customer is in trouble, he/she has communicated and reached out to me, lets help them.

It's not about putting obstacle courses in front of a customer that needs help, it's about solving their problem. That's like saying, "Sorry sir, you've called me on the phone, I only read faxes"! With Consulting and Professional Services 2.0, we still need to Delight the Customer

OK, so you're probably thinking something along the lines of "That's impossible, how would you maintain an SLA", my answer to that is quite simple and I learnt this lesson in 2001 when I signed my first enterprise customer (Fortune 50). We negotiated a support agreement with SLA's etc. and set out, as soon as he countersigned the agreement he slid open his bottom drawer and placed the agreement in the drawer and said something along the lines of: "Do your best, treat my team and my systems as if they were yours. If you do that, I should never have to look at this agreement. If I ever have to get the agreement out and look at SLA's, it's already too late". Of course, not all customers are the same and some lean on agreements more than others, but in my 8+ years of experience, trust and accessibility means more than an SLA.

A fitting quote from Mahatma Gandhi, sourced of various places on the web.

A customer is the most important visitor on our premises, he is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption in our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider in our business. He is part of it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a favor by giving us an opportunity to do so.