Month: February 2010

Kindle for BlackBerry (beta) is now available

After the Kindle devices, the applications Kindle for iPhone and Kindle for PC … now we have the Kindle for BlackBerry. The Kindle family is getting bigger and bigger. I can imagine soon we will have Kindle for Android, Kindle for OSX, Windows Phone Series 7 etc. etc. However, something new to me from their press release …

  • Search and browse more than 420,000 books, including 102 of 112 New York Times Bestsellers, directly from their BlackBerry
  • Read books in full color, including children’s books, cookbooks, travel books, textbooks and graphic novels

Wow, 420,000 books !! And books in full color !! May be because I didn’t downloaded any cookbooks or travel books before, so I don’t really know whether my Kindle for iPhone and Kindle for PC have this function or not. Anyway, good news for all BlackBerry users.

Don’t forget to check out other Kindle posts !!

Happy Chinese New Year and Valentine’s Day

Time flies and it’s the Chinese New Year (the year of Tiger) again. Somehow the New Year day this year is also the Valentine’s Day (it happens every 38 years I was told), truly a special day that East meets West. To celebrate this, there is one thing the same in both worlds though – beautiful flowers.

Have a great day and great year ahead !!

Customer service in 21st century, in Twitter style

So we all know Twitter can do many things – other than telling your followers what you’re eating, you can also use Twitter to express your views, to collect other people’s views, and to spread your friends’ views (by re-tweeting). And of course, we’ve heard many stories about using Twitter to find missing teens or getting better customer services.

I for one is a believer that Twitter can help improving customer services but then believing is one thing, can experience one is another. That was an incident last week related to a trip to Mumbai, India in February and I needed to get a room and airport transportation services from Hyatt Mumbai.

Looked like a simple task, I know. But somehow somewhere the reservation record was not right, I had email exchanged with the “e-concierge”, the “Catering Sales manager” (yes, strange I know) and “General Manager” (yes, right), but still could not sort the things out. So I decided … to air my frustration through Twitter.

And then within two hours, Hyatt customer services / Twitter team found my tweet and replied with another tweet.

I then direct-messaged the reservation confirmation number to them. In an hours or two, I was told the reservation was done exactly the same as my request, and then a follow-up email from Hyatt Germany service team (!!) wrapped up the case.

Wow, I love Hyatt’s service and obviously the capability of Twitter. The big question to me is how can one corporation compete without providing the same level of services in today’s world ?

What’s your Twitter customer service stories ?