Twitter, the social networking and micro-blogging service, has gained lot of popularity. It is popularly used for social media marketing. Now it has entered customer service as well.

IPscape, an Australian cloud-based provider of contact center technology, announced it has added Tweet functionality to multi-channel contact center technology, in order to aid contact center productivity. The beta availability of Twitter is introduced as an integral element in its multi-channel contact center technology solution.

Company officials with IPscape (News - Alert) said in a press release that the new Tweet functionality will join voice calls, emails and SMS messages in a single communication queue into the contact centre. With the help of IPscape’s technology, contact centre managers can now assign specific people to respond to tweets in the queue.

According to the release, IPscape uses cloud-based technology to queue voice calls, emails, SMS messages and tweets in the cloud, ready for the next contact centre agent to be available. By leveraging the smarts of the IPscape software, tweets are queued just like emails or SMS messages and directed to the handpicked ‘approved to tweet’ agents.

The ‘approved to tweet’ agents can also respond to voice calls, email and SMS messages. This helps in increasing the productivity of contact centers. In addition, proactive tweets can be instigated by these agents to notify followers of emergencies or other general service messages.

The new tweet functionality is offered as part of the overall IPscape contact centre solution and is available on a pay-as you-use basis.

Clients can now have a complete inbound and outbound contact centre with just a browser and business-grade broadband connection. This enables them to easily scale according to business requirements and call or tweet volumes, say officials with IPscape.

Officials with IPscape said that the new Twitter technology enablement is in limited beta to selected organisations with general availability in the next few months. Apart from the Twitter technology enablement, IPscape will also be sponsoring social media workshops for contact centre managers.

The social media workshops are designed to assist contact centre managers develop the prerequisite social media strategies and policies that will underpin their Twitter customer service interactions.Simon Burke, CEO at IPscape, said, "While many seek to 'sell' using Twitter, customers are already turning to Twitter for customer service and this is only going to increase. By sheer volume it will quickly move beyond being able to be managed by marketing and PR types. Ultimately existing experts in customer service, those in the contact centre, are perfectly placed to interact via this new channel."

"Our highly flexible cloud-based model improves staff productivity and eliminates the upfront capex and lengthy delays of traditional old world providers," added Burke. "Give us 24 hours and business-grade broadband and you’ll have a complete feature-rich multi-channel contact centre ready to go - last generation providers can’t even come close to that speed."According to IPscape, the IPscape solution is used mainly in call or contact centers to alleviate issues around cost containment, speed to market, real-time insight and the integration of new communication channels such as social media.