Many small business owners and entrepreneurs are using Twitter as a marketing tool. It is a powerful marketing tool, but that is not the only function the application can perform. One British rail company is notifying its passengers of train delays. This is a great example of how you can use Twitter to better your customers service.

Twitter can make a great customer service tool. You can use it to send out specific notifications to customers regarding your service, billing information such as changes to policy, packaging and shipping notices, and any of several other customer service functions.

What makes Twitter so unique in its nature is the simplicity model for mass communication. While Facebook and MySpace both allow users to send out mass communications to fans, that’s not their primary purpose or function. It IS Twitter’s primary purpose, which means that your followers follow your stream precisely because they want to receive your mass communications. And that’s what makes Twitter a useful customer service tool.

In your print materials – on your invoices, bills of laden, stationery, e-mails, and other marketing collateral – you can include your Twitter account and encourage current customers to follow you. Then you can simply tweet your changes and updates or write a blog post and link to it from Twitter. You can even take customer questions on Twitter.

Where Twitter will be in 5 or 10 years is anybody’s guess, but where it is today is a new mass communication tool with flexibility and simplicity. With Twitter, customer service is a lot better for a lot of companies.