Customer Service Via Twitter Can Help Business Reputation

Great customer service can be the ultimate marketing tool. This isn’t anything new or earth shattering, but it is sometimes forgotten and plays in the shadows of big time advertising and marketing campaigns. In the world of social media, we are always formulating strategies to engage customers by listening to them, participating in conversations with them, and building communities to support them. We have tools from Facebook to Twitter to Wetpaint to facilitate all the above. We have online ads, sponsored blogs, and affiliate programs to draw customers to our products and services. But when it comes down to it, what is it that the customer wants? To experience a personal interaction. To have a voice and be heard. To trust.

Customers are engaging in global conversations about your products, and if you’re not engaged and listening, it isn’t going to matter how creative or how glossy your ad is, your customer will be clicking on your competitor. However, with more and more social media tools becoming main stream, you as a privy business can engage. But first you need to realize that gone are the days of passive customers.

Customers are using communities to tell their friends about products, they are writing online reviews for all to see, they are tweeting about their positive and negative experiences. Customers are reaching a mass audience shouting praise or resentment for your business. “This rallies in an exciting new age for consumerism and how we do business. The internet is word of mouth set on fire, and can be your best friend or your worst enemy.” (Singer, 2008)

One way to make it your best friend is to use Twitter as a customer service tool, and if done properly, it will serve as a great marketing tool as well. As Grunig, Grunig, and Dozier said in Excellent Public Relations and Effective Organizations:

[W]e show that the value of public relations comes from the relationships that communicators develop and maintain with publics. We show that reputation is a product of relationships and that the quality of relationships and reputation result more from the behavior of the organization than from the messages that communicators disseminate. (James E. Grunig, 2002)

Let me give you an example. A few weeks ago my bank statement arrived showing I had a service charge of $5.95. I didn’t know what the charge was for so on Monday morning I called Bank of America (BoA) to ask why I was charged. The customer representative told me that because of the type of account I have I’m required to have a monthly direct deposit, and since I didn’t have a deposit last month I was charged the fee. The reason I didn’t have a direct deposit last month and the reason I wasn’t going to in the foreseeable months to come is because I had recently been laid off. Needless to say, I wasn’t too happy about this policy the bank was now enforcing. After learning what the charge was for, I hung up the phone wondering if there was anything I could do. I decided to test the waters of the social media world. I tweeted about my experience with BoA. Within 15 minutes, someone at the other end of the cloud answered my tweet to my surprise. In less than an hour, I was connected to someone who could help me, I spoke to a very nice gentleman in the Chairman of the Board’s office, and he was able to solve my problem. I was astonished at the level of service I had just received from BoA. I honestly couldn’t believe I had such a personal interaction with one of the biggest banks in the world. I immediately tweeted about my experience in which I received this tweet. Throughout the day, I updated my Facebook status to tell my friends and family about my BoA experience. For the next week, I told people about it when I spoke to them. It really made an impression on me. Just by using Twitter and listening to their customers, BoA was able to help and build a relationship while at the same time improving their reputation, marketing their services, and enhancing WOM.

BoA isn’t the only company providing customer service via Twitter. More and more businesses, large and small, are learning that there are low cost, flexible, measurable ways to improve customer service, and in turn, relationships and reputation. (Brogan, 2008) Matt Jurmann at Chromatic, Sarah Perez at ReadWriteWeb , and Jon Swartz at USAToday list just some of the companies using Twitter for brand management and customer service:

· Comcast

· Southwest Airlines

· NetworkSolutions

· Dell Computers

· Twirl

· FireFox

· Verizon

· DISQUS

· PepsiCo

· JetBlue Airways

· Whole Foods Market

Lastly, there are tools that are available for companies to use to measure and track customer satisfaction. The key is to listen so you can join in the conversation. Here are just a few tools:

Pipes: track brand, product, company, CEO mentions on a slew of social media sites, including flickr, twitter, friendfeed, digg etc.

Twitalyzer: is a unique tool to evaluate the activity of any Twitter user and report on relative influence, signal-to-noise ratio, generosity, velocity, clout, and other useful measures of success in social media

TweetScan: performs real-time monitoring

Monitter: Monitter makes it simple to track multiple keywords on one page using columns. Create a new column for each new keyword or keyword variation you want to track. Monitter will update in real-time whenever those words are mentioned on Twitter.

Tweetbeep: If your brand isn’t getting dozens of mentions per hour, or if you want to be sure you’re catching everything, Tweetbeep will check Twitter for you and send you emails with all of the mentions of your brand, as well as links so you can easily save tweets or write a response.

Radian6: are now offering social media analysis and monitoring solutions for PR and advertising professionals

Remember it’s not the few tweets alone that make or break you, “it’s the exponential potential of “ReTweeting” (RT) by other Twitter users that can rapidly spread across the micro-blogosphere, to the blogosphere, and eventually to highly trafficked news websites and blogs. Just as negative tweets have the potential to quickly spread and destroy a company, positive tweets have the potential to quickly spread and strengthen the image and credibility of a company.” (Jurmann, 2009) It reminds me of the line in Field of Dreams, “If you build it, they will come.” Build the credibility, increase the transparency, show you care all through customer service and the reputation and customers will follow.

Works Cited

Brogan, C. (2008, April 9). Customer Service Needs New Channels- Or Does It. Retrieved from Community and Social Media: http://www.chrisbrogan.com/customer-service-needs-new-channels-or-does-it/

Ibsen, D. A. (2009, March 21). Customer Service & Support: The Forgotten Marketing Tool. Retrieved from Five Blogs Before Lunch: http://daveibsen.typepad.com/5_blogs_before_lunch/2009/03/customer-service-support-the-forgotten-marketing-tool.html

James E. Grunig, l. A. (2002). Excellent Public Relations and Effective Organizations. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc.

Jurmann, M. (2009, February 13). 7 Impressive Twitter Customer Service/Brand Management Cases. Retrieved from Chromatic Blog: http://www.chromaticsites.com/blog/impressive-twitter-customer-service-brand-management-cases/

Parr, B. (2009, May 9). HOW TO: Use Twitter for Customer Service. Retrieved from Mashable: http://mashable.com/2009/05/09/twitter-customer-service/

Perez, S. (2008, April 10). How to Get Customer Service Via Twitter. Retrieved from ReadWriteWeb: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_to_get_customer_service_via_twitter.php

Singer, A. (2008, August 7). Great Customer Service: The Ultimate PR/Marketing Tool. Retrieved from The Future Buzz: http://thefuturebuzz.com/2008/08/07/great-customer-service-the-ultimate-prmarketing-tool/

Swartz, J. (2009, June 25). Businesses Use Twitter to Communicate with Customers. Retrieved from USAToday: http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2009-06-25-twitter-businesses-consumers_N.htm