The emergence of the 1-800 number changed the customer service game fifty years ago. It enabled customers to directly reach out to the companies they support with their hard-earned money. Back then, snail mail was the only other way to communicate.
Now, five decades later, the game has changed drastically. In 2014, brands were asked over 22 million questions on Twitter and Facebook alone. And statistics from Social Baker reflect that the majority of those questions are not being answered on Twitter.
Your customers want to interact with your brand, and you want to give them better customer service. Here’s how to tweet and deliver the customer service your customers want.
Taking Customer Service Public
Customers are attracted to the public nature of customer service tweets. They are not something a brand can erase. It’s not like calling customer service where you can be put on hold forever or be hung up on. It’s an upside that is no doubt responsible for the staggering rise in these types of tweets in the last few years. But while a public tweet can be very satisfying if you get a timely response, it can be equally frustrating if your tweet is ignored altogether.
In fact, fewer than 30 percent of questions to major brands were answered in the second quarter of 2015, according to Social Baker. Now that is a mind-boggling statistic. When a customer reaches out to you and you don’t answer the phone or respond to an email, it upsets that one customer, or maybe more if they write a bad Yelp review. But if a customer tweets to you publicly and you do nothing, it’s out there for the whole community to see. And you also open the floodgates for more tweets of a very negative nature. Remember, you can block a user but you can’t stop them from using a hashtag.
Making Marketing Magic
The best strategy to handle the public nature of customer service on Twitter is simple: answer every tweet. Every single one. This will not only show the customer tweeting that you’re on top of your game and present on your social media accounts, it will show anyone else looking at your account that you’re interactive and you stand behind your product or service. The best companies hope for complaints and turn them into content consumers. Look at every tweet, whether negative or positive, to show your customers and your prospective customers that you care.
Make Your Feed Extraordinary
If you’re a Twitter newbie, you might notice that a lot of Twitter users, even a lot of businesses, use duplicate content to populate their feeds. You’ll notice that many tweets don’t have pictures or even full-length descriptions, but are cut off in the middle of a caption and followed by an Instagram or Facebook link. Sounds like a great way to save time and build your Twitter following right? Wrong!
Duplicate content is a terrible way to build your brand’s Twitter presence. Your customers are not only looking for remedies to their problems or answers to their questions. Part of providing great customer service is providing information on your Twitter feed that your followers can’t find anywhere else. Why would they follow you on Twitter if they see the same content on your Facebook or Instagram accounts?
Add pictures and videos to your posts, and make them original, as well as useful, for your customers. Every sixth or tenth tweet should be an advertisement. Your other tweets should be relevant industry information, how-to guides, inspirational quotes and other non-advertorial content that helps define your brand, not just your product or service. Take Amway’s Twitter account for example. It’s not heavily recruiting new reps or pushing products. It’s informing its audience about its philanthropic ventures, posting pictures of its employees and sharing its ethos through photo quotations. This is how you engage your Twitter audience and inspire confidence in your customers to reach out to you and give you their valuable feedback.
About the Author
Stacy Eden is a Phoenix, Arizona native with a passion for art, power tools, and historical significance. She draws inspiration from classic cars, ancient mythological sculptures and jewelry designers such as Delfina Delettrez, Shaun Leane, and Dior Jewellery creative director Victoire de Castellane.