Some time ago, I had my twitter account suspended.  Mind you, I was not sent a courtesy warning to inform me of any terms of service (TOS) violations that I had been guilty of (probably due to the fact that I had not committed any violations) nor had I been sent an actual notification of the suspension.  So, I did what any rational person would do..I screamed and cursed at twitter for an hour!  Just kidding, actually I simply went to the website, and looked for a contact at the support desk to resolve the issue.

Unknown to me at the time, twitter does not have a customer support service in the traditional sense (they claim that since it is a free service, they cannot get to every e-mail but encourage people to try and help themselves!?)  So I search for a way to get clarification or challenge the suspension and come across a crude submission form which essentiall asks you to state your issue in your own words, select a category of the problem from a drop-down list, and as if it really makes a difference–it asks for your mood! Now, I may not be able to interpret what everyone feels, but I’m pretty sure that if you are having a difficult enough time with something that you have to submit a case to support, then I can’t imagine that you would be in a very cheery mood.

But, back to the issue at hand.  A couple of days go by and the only response I had received was a copy of my submission along with a generalized list of causes for having an account suspended.  Deciding to go back to my account and see if there was anything posted there, I noticed that my case had been marked closed.  There was no explanation, no person to contact to further details, no option to respond.  “Ok”, so I thought to myself, “maybe it takes a couple of days to rescind the suspension or something”.  Well, those few days turned into a couple months, partly due to the fact that I had family issues to deal with and twitter was not the primary thing on my mind.

On July 11, I went back and filed a new case, adding that this was the second time I had been filling out the form.  The same form which asked what mood I was in the first time I went through this process.  Imagine how I would have liked to respond this time!  Not surprisingly, I received the submission confirmation in my email.  Also, not surprisingly, that was the only communication I would receive on the subject.  I proceeded to log back in and manually check the status, and what do I see?  A second closed case with no resolution nor explanation!

So, what do I hope to accomplish with this post?  Absolutely nothing, but it is a good outlet for my frustration and maybe can let others out there know that if they are experiencing similar issues with twitter, or any other service, they are not alone.  But I will be bringing this post over to my business blog later today, and expanding upon it to relate it to poor business practices and planning, so check there later!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 15th, 2009 at 9:00 pm and is filed under general. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.