Twitter Customer Service Tips

Twitter Customer Service Tips

You could be offering school and office furniture like lunchroom tables or selling electronics such as audio-visual equipment. No matter what the product may be, customer service is naturally an essential part of any type of business.  Your relationship with the customer doesn’t end at the purchase, not if you want to continue building your brand and sustain your business. Communication tools play an important role here, and one particular social media platform called Twitter can enhance this aspect of your operations.

Twitter Advantages

This online social networking service is categorized as micro-blogging. Just like blogs, it’s a channel for anyone to express their opinions and share information except that you’re limited to short text messages.

As an online marketing channel, companies use it to post their profiles and reach out to their target audience. Those very same features provide advantages that can enable businesses to cultivate relationships with their customers and manage a positive experience of their brand.

  • Quick response – Customer service is essentially about solving problems and a critical factor here is how quickly you can respond. Phone and email are the traditional channels of communication used for customer support. These channels can be slow, however, when compared to how fast your messages can get to your customers via Twitter.
  • Immediate results – Your customers can just as quickly reply. This capacity for immediate feedback is not only helpful in problem resolution, but can also boost your support team’s morale and performance. They can immediately see how their assistance made an impact on customers.
  • Lower costs – Twitter is not just free, but also easy to learn and deploy. This makes it significantly more cost-effective than maintaining a call center’s services or training and equipping a traditional in-house customer service department.

A Few Twitter Pointers

While Twitter was never designed for the purpose of customer service, its features easily lend itself to such an undertaking. Here are a few tips on how to use the platform to implement customer support.

1. Establish your presence on Twitter – You have to first make it known you’re using this particular social media tool for problem resolution. Place a prominent button on your company’s website and post your announcements with an encouragement to follow you on Twitter.

2. Learn the features – Know when to send public @replies messages and when to use direct messages. DM’s allow you to send more detailed explanations and can reduce clutter on your company’s Twitter stream.

3. Personalize your approach – You can put the names of the support staff on the business account, use a combined photo of your face and your company’s logo as an avatar, and end your messages with your actual first name. All this brings the Twitter conversation closer to a personal interaction and helps build trust.

As you consistently provide great customer support on Twitter, the social media itself serves as a platform that can spread stories of your excellent services. It creates a positive feedback loop that improves brand experience and generates new leads.

This article was written by our guest blogger, Michelle, someone who loves sharing her knowledge on ways that business leaders, even with businesses selling lunchroom tables, can use social media to generate sales.