As businesses embrace Twitter as a great way to market their products and services, customers are embracing it as a way to talk to the company, to give kudos for a good experience and to complain about bad experiences or to share information on companies with a philosophy users dislike. To make sure that the customers talking about your brand are saying the right things, you need to keep your customer service staff in the Twitter loop. While there are many ways Twitter can improve your customer service, here are 10 simple things you can do to help make your customers feel loved.
- Listen – Make sure you’re constantly monitoring for the use of your business name, your product names, and any relevant keywords to your business. When you see them mentioned respond to the person doing the mentioning, but don’t try to do a hard sell. For example, if someone tweets that they’re having a problem that you can solve, just tweet a solution in response, don’t even hint that they should become your client, just position yourself as a go to person in your field. Then, when people need solutions, you’ll be the first one they think of.
- Follow back – Whether they’re your customer yet or not, if someone engages with you in a positive, or constructive way, follow them back. If someone tweets in a way that makes you want to engage with them – follow them. The more you’re engaging with your followers & the people you follow, the larger the audience you’ll be in front of. That doesn’t mean you have to auto-follow every account that follows you, or to engage with trolls. Just follow back anyone who wants to interact with you on a productive level.
- Offer helpful information – Don’t always be selling. Give your followers tips or how to do something, suggest preventative measures they can take to prevent common problems, offer something that gives your followers insight into your field, or what to look for when hiring a professional. Even giving people instructions on how to do things themselves is worthwhile. Generally, once people know what’s involved, they’re happy to pay someone to do it, and the people who are likely to have a go themselves aren’t likely to be calling you in the first place.
- Publicise changes to the regular offering – Whether it’s being closed due to some sort of emergency, holiday hours, sales, product or service specials tweeting the information a couple of times before and during the events will give your customers a good reason to follow you, and will lessen the chances that someone will miss out on something important to them.
- Be a person – Twitter is a great way for small businesses to let their customers get to know them. You don’t have to overshare, or mention anything you don’t want to, but using a personable tone when you tweet and mentioning a product or service that you enjoyed every now and then is a great way to connect with people.
- Make them laugh – Everybody loves a business with a sense of humour and unless you’re a funeral director, having the occasional joking tweet is a great way to appear more human to your followers. Just be very careful to ensure that whoever is posting the jokes on behalf of the company is actually funny and will stick to posting things that aren’t in poor taste (unless that’s part of your branding).
- Hashtag judiciously – Hashtags are great for conversations and for letting people find you and sometimes, they can even be used to give a funny emphasis to a tweet. On the other side of the coin, a message composed almost entirely of hashtags just makes you seem to be trying too hard, and using an ill thought out hashtag can live with you much, much longer than you’d like (remember #susanalbumparty).
- Love the individuals – If you’re following back your clients, it’s easy to create a private list of “VIP” clients which can consist of; a few biggest spenders, everyone who has used your services more than once, or any other segment you like. Then monitor that list regularly and comment on major events (happy birthday etc.), even offer discounts “Congratulations Bob, DM us for a voucher for 10% off next time you’re in” or something similar just to reward loyalty. Remember, a high level of engagement you get with your most loyal customers can be the best advertising you could possibly have. Imagine how you’d feel coming across a Twitter feed full of “OMG! You are the best whatever-it-is-you-do in the world”. You’d pay attention to that company, and probably even follow back too, wouldn’t you?
- Have staff monitoring Twitter that have authority to act – We all understand that sometimes our complaints and problems have to be referred to a different department for resolution. But if that’s always the case, or if you have a Twitter feed full of “Sorry I’ve referred that to another department” don’t think you’re fooling anyone. We all know you’re only pretending to care. It’s worse than not trying at all.
- Don’t, ever, EVER, no matter how busy you are, be tempted to outsource your Twitter entirely – By all means have someone helping, get people to schedule tweets, respond to basic tweets (What are your opening hours? How much does a jelly donut cost?) but when it comes to developing relationships and talking to your customers you have to do it yourself or risk your customers feeling like you’ve betrayed their trust by using someone outside your company to tweet for you.
So there you are, 10 reasonably simple and painless ways you can use Twitter to improve the services you offer your customers. Most of all, it’s about letting your customers feel like they have an insight into your business and a relationship with you. You don’t have to get all touchy-feely or overshare intimate details of your life, just communicate with your clients and future clients as someone you know and like.
