Is Twitter a good venue for customer service?
While I’ve seen it work, the problem is that if your non-social media customer service sucks, your social media customer service will just suck more.
I’ve written about customer service before and the companies I’ve called out for poor customer service did so in both the traditional space of “call-in telephone support” and requests for assistance on Twitter. On the other hand, those that do customer service well on the phone also tend to do it well on Twitter.
What’s happening is that customer service executives at companies with iffy customer service are seeing all the positive press that companies with stand-out customer service are getting for their success on Twitter. This leads them to hiring a social media consultant to teach them how to use Twitter for customer service. It’s like having a Twitter customer service account is just another buzz word for the “follow me” corporate world.
If you don’t have the culture of Zappos, you can’t be Zappos. If you aren’t Joe Sorge and the team he’s built at AJ Bombers, don’t try and copy their Twitter success. Build you own. Twitter is like the telephone; it’s just a vehicle for communication.
Sure, you can take proactive steps on Twitter that you couldn’t do elsewhere. The real key is listening to and filtering the social media chatter. For example, are you utilizing the search capabilities of Twitter to monitor for use of you company name? You should search not just for your Twitter handle, but for your company name or product names as well. That’s how a big brand’s customer service account found me recently. I mentioned I was having trouble with their brand and they tweeted back. So far, that’s about all they’ve done right but the jury is still out so I won’t name the brand right now.
How’s Twitter working out for you as a customer service venue?
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