> why on earth should Twitter be an official support channel for a business?

The same reason you do anything - they’ll take their business elsewhere unless you provide service and support in the way they want it.

People don’t like being told to go away and follow some other procedure when they have a problem.

Might as well tell them they should avoid having any problems requiring support while you’re at it - that’ll make it even easier for you.

This is flawed thinking. Surely you're not proposing to implement every support channel your users might want to use? People are generally happy to use designated channels, as long as it's discoverable, easy to use and effective.

People will call you out on Twitter. You likely have a brand account on Twitter already so you'll already get those mentions. Even if you don't have an account people will create a hashtag.

If you want to control your brand perception you don't want the first result when people look for your brand on Twitter to be people tweeting about how terrible you are.

The reasons to do support on Twitter have less to do with what's tech support needs and more with marketing and controlling your brand perception.

You do customer support via social media for the same reason you do PR and marketing on social media: because that’s where your customers are! People spend a lot of time on social media.

Go to your customers if you can. Don’t force them to come to you unless you have to.

I really hate when a company lists "Support Email" address and never replies to it. Dozens of companies did this to me (sent from my gmail). And yet in horrible and unusable twitter or slightly less horrible facebook they reply in hours, or even minutes.

If sent emails were publicly visible (and indexed, searchable, etc.) you can bet that responses to them would be a bit... snappier.

Twitter has been the absolute best way for me to get actual support from Australia Post and Telstra*

Unfortunately, the Telstra CSAs on Twitter aren't actually allowed to do anything useful so they mostly direct me to other, more useless support channels.

Because it's cheaper than having an actual support hotline and easier to ignore than having email.

And in the US especially, companies hate having to support users, which is why they are also pushing for AI support instead of actually having a human there.

Think about it, when is the last time you had an issue with some Bay Area Saas company and could call them on the phone to get support, like you'd do with a bank?

To put it bluntly -- the prevailing mindset is that customer support is a cost-centre. It's hard to reliably measure customer satisfaction, so its value is misunderstood.

And if you're the only game in town with your own little walled garden, and everyone in your industry has entirely automated (read: low opex) support, where's the incentive to do better?

Which is partly because the business model is selling data to large companies and data brokers, not providing a service to the "customers" (users). And then you get places like Facebook that are themselves data brokers, and sell access to the data so they can claim they aren't Acxiom.

Twitter is sometimes for little Davids the only way to put pressure on Goliaths.

As a consumer, if a company with a Twitter presence responds that way I'll ignore them. Because 9 times out of 10 when I tweet at a brand it's either because I'm calling them out for actively harmful stuff (like using plaintext passwords) or prodding them about issues that likely affect more people than just me.

If I have a specific support request about my personal account, I'll go through the usual channels. But if it's on twitter, it's probably there because the extra visibility and public accountability is intentional.

That's a funny one. I worked at a place where the support team that worked for the social network accounts of the company had better tools and higher priority when doing their jobs than the phone/site support team, so effectively customers asking for support on Twitter or Facebook got better and faster support than customers asking for support on the phone or the site. I assume that's because companies are terrified of bad publicity on social networks.

> bad publicity on social networks

Exactly. Social networks moved support from private, hidden systems to a public channel. This benefitted the user, since the brand has more to lose from interactions that are negative, non-responsive, re-directive, etc.

Because...Millenials?