Now you can create cases via Twitter

By Joseph Jude on May 2, 2009
Posted Under: Programming
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Traditionally, customer service was provided via phone, email or web. In the age of Twitters and Facebooks, those options seems so old age practice. Since youngsters spend so much time on the ubiquitous Twitter, they would eventually bring customer service to Twitter and other social media.

Here is how YATSY (a simple case management system for Google App Engine) is integrated with Twitter.

Isn’t that simple? Follow @yatsy; once yatsy follows back, send a direct message to yatsy to create a case. YATSY system will read this DM and create a case & will respond back.

Having Twitter Integration is a double edge sword. If you provide a fantastic customer service it will be known in the social media. On the other hand, if you do a lousy job, it will spread like a wild fire. Yet, if you monitor Twitter Streams, you’ll be able to improve your products and customer service too.

Now for the techies. How did I implement Twitter Integration? YATSY itself is written using web2py, a web-framework in Python. Twitter streams are parsed using python-twitter, a simple & efficient Python wrapper for Twitter API.

Steps Forward

• Use Google App Engine Cron to initiate twitter parsing & case creation (now one need to explicitly execute the function)
• Using the same Cron facility for auto-follow
• Use a message queue for IN/OUT messages (if you know a good message queue implementation in Python, please leave a comment)
• Integrate (case) notes with Twitter

If your hands are itching to test this, go ahead and follow yatsy & once yatsy follow you back, DM your case text.

If you are interested in checking out the code or want to do a code review, head to Google Code page