Providing exceptional customer service when customers have lots of channels to share their experiences can create frustration and fragmentation for the customer and public relations nightmares for brands. How can companies create an exceptional brand experience, delight their customers, and create cost efficiencies within their customer service departments?
Here are seven winning Twitter customer service strategies.
1. Create Unique Account For Customer Service Needs
Companies like Delta (@DeltaAssist) and Nike (@NikeSupport) have created successful accounts to service customers needs on Twitter. They have dedicated accounts specific to the purpose of support.
The @NikeSupport account has more than 360,000 tweets that have been dedicated to issue resolution as well as providing athletes with encouragement. The support they provide runs the gamut from practical (how to get runs back I lost on my app) to inspirational (way to go! we’re rooting for you).
The Nike brand is built on the supposition that we should all “Just Do It” and the athlete, whether weekend warrior or Olympic Marathon runner, are all equally important.
2. Empower Customer Service To Resolve Issues
If your brand is dedicating a customer service account for Twitter, they have to be empowered to make decisions and resolve issues. Delta’s support account, @DeltaAssist makes it clear that they are available to help resolve issues, but if you need immediate assistance they provide a domain and a phone number for quicker response.
Creating expectation quickly can help customers as well as support staff. That provision of clarity goes a long way in establishing reasonable and achievable expectations.
3. Provide Clarity About Issues Twitter Customer Service Can & Can’t Resolve
It’s imperative to provide clarity, not just to your Twitter customer service team but to your customers about what they can and can’t resolve. If a customer spends 30 minutes engaging with a Twitter customer service account only to be told that that person can’t resolve their issue, the customer will rightly be frustrated at the loss of time, delays, and increased frustration.
In this example from @ComcastCares it’s clear that either the customer service staff is under resourced (many responses apologize for delays) or it’s questionable if Comcast really does care.
It’s not the fault of the customer service staff if they have more responses than they can quickly resolve, responsibility lies in staffing and creating resource designation for the Twitter customer service effort.
Your staff must be empowered to make decisions or the brand needs to better clarify what type of service customers can expect from the Twitter support account. That clarification needs to take into account what their customers expect. Post-service surveys and other qualitative and quantitative data can be used to find the sweet spot of efficiency and customer satisfaction.
4. Have A Personality
Customer service representatives need to go through brand immersion and understand the brand voice. If your brand is fun and witty, the Twitter customer service responses should embrace that brand voice.
The Twitter Zappos support account, @Zappos_Service exists to help with customer service. This account exemplifies the fun, here-to-serve personality of the Zappos brand.
5. Be Part Of The Brand Story
Unlike the call center where issues are resolved in relative privacy, issues resolved on Twitter will be a matter of record and be subjected to sharing. This makes the need for role clarity and ownership that much more important in Twitter and other social channels leveraged for customer service.
Creating exceptional customer service guidelines for Twitter and other channels is imperative to how Twitter will be seen for your brand as a resolution channel. If your customer service team understands “commanders intent” and is given role clarity and ownership of resolving issues Twitter can prove to be a valuable and cost-effective channel.
Responses should be crafted thoughtfully with the understanding that the representative is creating a billboard for the brand that many people may see. If a strategic roadmap isn’t created for customer engagement and issue resolution it will be apparent quickly and damaging to the brand’s reputation.
6. Provide A Seamless Customer Service Experience
Map out what the customer service process should look like and how Twitter fits into that ecosystem. Have a way to identify the problem or issue, whether by a customer identifier (such as a frequent flyer number) or other identifying information, regardless of where the customer takes the problem.
For example, the @Zappos team, whether on the regular Twitter account or their support account, is empowered to resolve issues. They don’t add a layer of complexity by referring the customer to a different channel.
7. Engage In Twitter Customer Service Analysis
Identify the top questions, problems, issues customers are having and create an FAQ to share that may continue to increase speed of issue resolution.
Twitter (not surprisingly;) does this really well. They have created a form that identifies top issues, then provides drop downs and comment boxes so they can get a clear understanding of the problem as well as define if a solution has already been crafted that they can share.
This can be a great place to curate problems and questions to leverage in the content mapping process. If brands take time to analyze customer service tweets and learn from that customer engagement, not only can we make customers happier, we can turn them into brand advocates.
Takeaways
Twitter customer service support is no longer a “nice-to-have”. For most brands, it’s a customer expectation. Just as in the early days of social, to quote Charlene Li, author of “Groundswell”, you can choose whether or not to participate, but your customers will be there with or without you.
Twitter support deserves the same brand immersion, brand storytelling and brand resource designation as any channel on or offline. Not only are those customer service experiences relevant to the customer journey, but they are also a record of how we treat our customers. Sometimes taking an unhappy customer and making them happy can be a most unlikely but proven path to customer advocacy and loyalty.
Are you providing exceptional customer service on Twitter?