Customers want you 24/7

24/7 Customer is a big,well established customer services firm specialised in outsourcing business processes - and yes, they are also headquartered in India. In fact, I've met their CEO and a number of board members over the years in some of the writing I have done on outsourcing, but I had never heard of them being involved in the social media space.

That was until I followed up the comment on my blog. I got connected to Bharathwaj Vasudevan - just Bharath for short - who is their Chief Marketing Officer. Bharath introduced me to the fact that 24/7 Customer now has an active innovation lab dedicated to churning out new ideas for products and platforms - far from their earlier heritage as an offshore call centre operation.

One of their recent efforts has been '24/7tweetview'. This is a tool focused on Twitter and designed to help companies monitor online conversations about their brands and products, aimed at helping companies offer better online support - or just to improve their online marketing.

What's interesting to me here is that 24/7 Customer is not a media firm. They aren't in the PR business. They were the guys you called to help set up a customer service centre, the call centre, the chat team, the Intelligent Voice Response that is never as intelligent as you expect... and yet here they are offering a tool that is on the market using a freemium pricing model. 

You can use it for free. Take a look. Search for your own company or products as you like. There are some analytic reports built in, which they estimate cover around 70% of the needs of most companies. Anyone wanting something more bespoke can just ask - and they get a bespoke quote for an upgraded tool, built specifically around the client requirements and yet still charged on a per use basis.

Some media firms charging extortionate fees for complex analysis of Twitter trends ought to watch out. Have the customer service experts got there first?