It’s pretty obvious that using Twitter is a smart customer service tactic. In mere moments, your company can connect one-on-one with your customer – solving their problems and building their trust. Twitter can be an invaluable humanization tool for your disposal, if you know how to use it.

In a recent interview with Seer Interactive CEO Wil Reynolds, he tells of his personal customer service disaster story with a large and popular airline. When he needed help on the check-in website, Reynolds sent a tweet to their customer service handle on Twitter. As he awaited a response, he noticed that many others were tweeting with similar concerns. Instead of responding to countless customer concerns, the customer service Twitter account only responded to celebrity Star Jones. Immediately, what this airline communicated to their customers was that they weren’t important. It didn’t matter how many thousands of miles Reynolds had flown with them; he wasn’t a “celebrity”, and so he didn’t matter to them.

Don’t let this scenario happen to your company. Before you decide to take your customer service to Twitter, here are five guidelines to consider:

1. Make it a Policy: Don’t just assume people know how to act online. Before you throw an employee out into the live and interactive world-wide-web, make sure you have a policy on their conduct, and the way they represent your company.
    
2. Make Hours Apparent: Only respond to tweets within the confines of your business hours, and make sure your hours are explicitly shown on your Twitter profile page. If you inform your customer when you are and aren’t there, they won’t feel ignored when you don’t answer right away. It also protects your company from seeming cold (by not responding) or inconsistent (by sometimes-but-not-always responding at 8 pm).
    
3. Make It Real: Automated responses don’t cut it. The customers are too savvy for that, and they won’t grow to trust your brand through automated responses. Educate your employees so that they know exactly how to respond – in word and in deed.
    
4. Make the Responses Happen: Make sure you have enough people working on the account in order to respond to every customer concern – no matter if they’ve used your company once, a thousand times, or if they are (or aren’t) a celebrity. As Reynolds points out, if your employee is only able to respond to one out of three tweets, it’s time to hire more people. Every tweet directed “@” you must be answered, or it’s not worth doing.
    
5. Make It Actionable: Ensure that your employees can respond in actionable ways. It’s not enough to simply say, “I’m sorry that’s not working.” You have to take it to the next level and be able to say, “I’m sorry that’s not working; here’s what we’re going to do for you.”

A company that is engaging with people and helping them solve their problems is seen as a company that people trust and want to use. Your customers become your personal advocates. The reputation you build through social media interaction has a payoff.

How have you seen social media (and Twitter in particular) hurt or help a business?

Are you currently using a social media platform to address customer service needs?

Tagged as: Communications, Customer Perception, Customer Service, Relationships, Social Media, Value Proposition