If your business is using Twitter, then chances are you will have already started receiving customer service-related questions (or tweets!). This isn’t really something you can ignore.
As a business, it’s almost impossible to compartmentalise your presence on social networks. It doesn’t really matter if you see your Twitter account more as a marketing channel, your customers or clients will just see it as a representative of your brand.
And they will contact you for a vast number of different reasons, including questions that would have traditionally been seen as customer service. There is no avoiding it and the worst thing you can do is ignore it.
So what does a business need to bear in mind when using Twitter to handle customer service:
Reply quickly – just as in any other customer service channel, customers don’t like to be kept waiting. So try and reply as quickly as possible.
Be honest and transparent – if you aren’t sure about the answer to a question or need to route it to someone else to answer, that’s fine. Just make sure you reply and let the customer know first.
Monitor brand mentions - often a customer service enquiry will be directed straight at you, making it easy to identify it and respond. But sometimes a customer might talk about your brand on Twitter without using your Twitter name. In these circumstances, even if they aren’t necessarily expecting a reply, you might be able to rescue a negative situation by getting in touch. In order to do this, you need to make sure you are effectively monitoring mentions of your brand. We’ve already suggested a number of free tools for this you might like to try
If necessary, take it off Twitter – often, 140 characters just isn’t enough. Don’t be afraid to ask the customer to email in or even better, take some contact details and get in touch yourself
Don’t worry about being authentic – some people seem afraid to be natural or ‘human’ on Twitter, but actually this can be a huge benefit to a customer service situation. Giving a personality to your brand can be very beneficial
Follow-up – did you help someone out and then never hear back? Don’t be afraid to get in touch a few days later and see if there is anything further you can do to help
What else is there? Anything we missed out? Let us know in the comments or on Twitter itself!
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