More and more people are discovering the power of social media to share their happiness and disgust with the companies they do business with. How your company reacts to those messages can impact the retention of your current customers and the acquisition of new ones.
Twitter is a convenient yet powerful medium for clients to use in sharing their experiences with your brand. Whether they are communicating directly with you (@reply or DM) or communicating about you in their tweet, you have the potential of increasing their happiness with you or making lemon from lemonade depending on how you use these five strategies.
1. Create a Twitter account. Creating an account is the first step to improving your Twitter customer service. You can't do Twitter customer service through Facebook or Google + or LinkedIn. Twitter is one of the most ubiquitous and powerful social media tools available. If you are not using it as a business advantage, you are being left behind. People are having discussions with you and about you in which you are not involved. There are plenty of articles out there on the use of Twitter for business and many Tweeple willing to help you if you just ask. I'm still amazed by the number of times I search a business on Twitter and don't find them. That in itself gives people an impression that you are behind the times. If once you create your Twitter account all you do is use it to listen (more on that in #3), it will be well worth the small amount of effort you have to put into it.
2. Use your account. I can't tell you the number of times I sent a tweet to the account of a business I frequent and received no reply. There is one giant computer software maker from the Northwest that I tweeted directly three times and NEVER received a reply. Another huge department store chain who recently announced the closing of hundreds of stores has never responded to my tweets about the terrible customer service at one of their eye care partners. It makes me wonder why they even created a Twitter account if they are never going to use it. If you create a business account and people go through the trouble of finding it in order to mention you and/or tweet you, then the least you can do is acknowledge them. The new Twitter makes it easier than ever to see when people are mentioning and retweeting you. There should be no excuse for you not to acknowledge that.
3. LISTEN. If people are celebrating you, then thank them for the kudos. If people are not happy with you, then acknowledge them and see what you can do to help. Anyone in the customer care business knows that most of the time all people want is someone to listen to them. Imagine if every time I called your customer service center, my call never went through or I was put on hold for 30 minutes. Oh wait, that does happen when I call some of your customer service centers. That's why I'm using Twitter to contact you instead! Just like when I call your customer service center, the same goes for Twitter. Answer my call and listen to me.
4. If you have more than one corporate account, coordinate and communicate between them. My cable company, Time Warner Cable, has numerous Twitter accounts. Some are regional accounts, some are general information accounts, and others are help/service accounts. I tweet TWC occasionally and have always received excellent assistance quickly. It is obvious that their accounts not only listen to their customers, but each account listens to the other accounts and understands what each of them does. If I tweet the wrong account, they will forward my message to the appropriate Twitter account so they can take care of me. They don't expect me to know or figure out which account to tweet.
If you create several corporate accounts, be sure to coordinate among them (what is the mission of each account) and ensure that they communicate with each other and know where to relay questions most appropriately. It's not the customer’s job to make sense of your strategy.
5. If we ask you a question, please answer it. I recently tweeted a huge furniture retailer to ask if they had a store near my in-laws in Nashville, TN. What I received was a tweet pointing me to their website store locator. Oh, gee, thanks. Like I couldn't have done that on my own. All they had to do was reply something like this, "No, we do not. The closest store would be in Atlanta or Cincinnati. You can see all our store locations here: http://website store locator." Now, I not only have my answer, but I can knock myself out finding locations across the globe. Remember that many times when we tweet you, we are on our mobile devices. We are probably also in a hurry for the information or we would take the time to look it up ourselves. I bet most Twitter users are quite adept at the use of Bing and Google. Please make it convenient for us. Don't answer us by giving us more work to do.
Using these five Twitter customer service strategies will put you leaps ahead of most of your competition. I and many of the people I know have made social media our number one choice when seeking customer service. It's also where we celebrate the fun and positive experiences with your product or from our last trip inside your store. We are not waiting until we get home to visit your website or post the comment to your blog. Twitter is the place we do this most. If you aren't using Twitter at all or not listening, then you are missing our interactions with you. Multiply me and my two friends (OK, one friend...OK, my wife) by the hundreds and thousands of customers you have on Twitter and you can see where this can make a huge difference for us.
And wait until you get the "listening" down and then you begin more proactively engaging with us on Twitter. That's when the real magic happens.
But let's not get ahead of ourselves. Baby steps.
No comments:
Post a Comment