Are you using social media to deliver excellent customer service to your customers?
Using social media to engage and connect with your customers isn’t just beneficial for business; it’s critical for customer loyalty.
Social media is often the first place that people flock when they have a negative experience with a business.
Without monitoring the conversations happening about your business online, you’re going to miss opportunities to answer questions, share stories, and solve problems for your customers.
When it comes to channels, Twitter is the platform to prioritize.
Prioritizing the platform:
Twitter is the most popular platform when it comes to company complaints; it seems to be the place people go when they want to vent and rant.
That’s why it’s important to be active and engaged on the platform; you need to maintain and manage your reputation.
Twitter is an excellent platform to provide and showcase your customer care for a number of reasons:
- It’s conversational: people are casual and conversational on the platform. As a business, you can connect with a customer by taking a more casual approach to communication and solving problems.
- Real-time: it’s a fast-moving platform. This means that companies have the ability to act and solve problems quickly. Quick solutions lead to happy customers.
- One-to-one: it’s easy to take a personalized approach on Twitter. Through DMs, you can connect on an individual basis and get into the heart of the matter without the rest of your fans seeing the entire conversation.
Studies show that individual, personalized responses lead to more positive feelings about a brand.
Engaging with customers daily is one of the best ways to drive these feelings.
Executing the engagement:
Engaging with your customers on social media takes time when done right.
It’s important to be consistent in your efforts to provide personal responses to problems.
When it comes to executing the engagement, it must be personal.
Providing personal responses to problems goes a long way in making a customer feel heard, cared for and valued; these experiences create customer loyalty.
Some of the best practices for using Twitter to engage with your customers online are:
- Customer service handle: Create a dedicated customer service Twitter handle for your business. Use this handle to respond and engage with all mentions of your brand – be they positive or negative. When a customer engages with your main company Twitter handle in a service-related capacity, direct them to tweet your specific customer service handle. All mentions should be responded to, regardless of the sentiment; this shows your fans that everyone is equally important.
- Be empathetic: When dealing with unhappy customers, show empathy. Apologize and let them know that you’re sorry for causing the issue or feeling they expressed. Honoring how your customers feel is the first step towards creating a connection.
- Offer to help: Always try to help solve the problem for the customer. If you can’t solve it individually, take whatever steps you can to escalate the problem to the parties with the responsibility for solving them.
- Personalization: Use yours and the customer’s name in your communication to make it more personal. Address the customer by their first name, and sign your tweets so they know who they are talking to.
- Be casual: It’s easier to connect with a person than a company. Take a human approach to your communications by being casual and avoiding use of jargon or scripts. Using a canned response will kill any sense of connection that was created. Instead, treat every situation like the unique opportunity that it is.
- Speed matters: Answer questions, share positive stories, and solve problems as fast as possible. Twitter is fast-moving, and the speed at which you respond to these touchpoints matters. However, never compromise the quality of the solution for speed. It’s better to take an extra hour to solve a problem thoroughly than to rush a response that isn’t accurate.
When it comes to customer service, creating a connection to the customer is critical.
Twitter is definitely *the* channel to execute this engagement strategy on because it’s the channel that’ll get the largest degree of complaints.
Companies can create customer loyalty by going above and beyond to provide personalized, timely, empathetic responses to their customers.
To take your reputation monitoring to the next level, read my blog on how to use Twitter search to stay in-the-know:
