As of today, Twitter may officially be mainstream.  Oprah created an account, I believe at the request of Ashton Kutcher, who is currently in a well documented and publicized race with CNN to be the first Tweep with a million followers.  Currently CNN has the lead with about 977,000 as compared to Ashton's roughly 974,000.  Besides just following a-list celebs and getting news updates, many Tweeps now use Twiter as a way to get customer service or support from a variety of companies.  There are some famous cases, like Dell and Comcast, so I'll offer up some examples that you may not have heard of.

Sometimes the Twitter connection with the company happens without the customer's intention.  Here's an example:

First day of the NCAA tourney, and we're trying to stream the games here at SwellPath.  Our DSL line is not performing at the promised speeds, so I express my frustration on Twitter.  Within 10 minutes I'm exchanging Tweets with the Qwest Twitter account.  Within 35 minutes the problems are resolved, and the tourney games are streaming in here at full-speed.  I had no intention of resolving the issue through Twitter, and no intention of spending a half-hour on the phone with Qwest.  This is about as close to a WOW moment as I'll ever get with Qwest; I was impressed and delighted with the response and service.

How about driving customers to Twitter for their customer service needs.  Take a look at the activation screen that I was served when I recently signed up for a Diigo account:

Similar to having live chat support on their site, but without any overhead, additional tools, browser capability issues, etc.  I simply contact them through a medium that I'm familiar with and is (almost) as instantaneous as phone or chat.

Finally, another quick example from DimDim, makers of a great alternative to WebEx and GoToMeeting:

I had expressed some issues I was having with DimDim, and they responded to help me resolve the issues.  After a couple direct messages and emails were exchanged, I realized the problem had been a user error.  DimDim was able to retain me as a user by solving my problem quickly.

I'd love to hear about others experiences with customer support or service via Twitter; have any stories?