Twitter: Customer Service Media?

When looking for customer service agents one usually goes through the following media: phone, chat rooms, forums, blogs, and email. Brad Shorr gives an example on his latest post on World Sell, Inc. of how Twitter has made “customer service proactive rather than reactive”.

Brad’s colleague was having trouble logging on to MyBlogLog, so she put out a tweet asking if anyone was having the same problem. Brad tweeted back confirming that he was having the same problem. Hours later, he received a tweet reply from @mblsupport apologizing for the service outage and stating that the problem had been fixed.

Can we expect the same service from other companies out there? Instead of waiting for customers to call in and report their problems, agents are proactively searching for technical issues on social sites.