Top 10 Social Media Customer Service Tips
Posted: September 21, 2012
Unless you've been hiding under a rock, you know that social media is a necessary part of your businesses marketing plan. Are you ready, however, to manage a possible influx of customer service requests via social media? Proper use of social media can save your business time, but more importantly it is a great way to reach out to your customers and keep them happy. The ten tips below can help your organization craft a powerful customer service presence using social media.
Unless you've been hiding under a rock, you know that social media is a necessary part of your businesses marketing plan. Are you ready, however, to manage a possible influx of customer service requests via social media? Proper use of social media can save your business time, but more importantly it is a great way to reach out to your customers and keep them happy. The ten tips below can help your organization craft a powerful customer service presence using social media.
Over the past few weeks I have been working on a new Mashable article and putting together my deck for Social Media Strategies Summit – Las Vegas. Through the process I’ve done a lot of research which keeps landing me on various customer service articles. There are so many brands using social media in creative and successful ways when it comes to customer service. Today I will share my Top Ten social media customer service tips to help your organization craft a powerful customer service presence using social media:
1- Create a Hashtag
If your organization is actively using Twitter it can be difficult to read through each and every tweet. However, you don’t want to miss an important customer service issue so try creating a hashtag (#) to help sift through your customer service tweets. The hashtag can be as simple as #customerservice or you can personalize it #customerserviceGSMI then all you have to do is create a search and you will have all customer service related tweets in one place. If you are going to do this consider using your Twitter background to encourage tweeters to use the hashtag and send out tweets reminding your followers to use your customer service hashtag.
2- Provide Hours of Operation
Social sites like Twitter are up and running 24 hours a day 7 days a week. This means your customers can tweet or post questions, concerns, grievances and compliments around the clock. Many will be expecting some type of response no matter what day or hour it may be. Unless a company has endless resources it will be impossible to keep up with your customer service in real-time. A good way to address this is to set expectations by posting your social hours of operation.
Comcast does a great job at this by dedicating a large portion of their Twitter background to listing hours of support and other ways to contact Comcast if help is needed. If you can man Twitter 24/7 then list that as well but be ready to respond to tweets around the clock.
3- Make it Personal
Zappos does this beautifully with @Zappos_Cares. Not only do they have a dedicated Twitter account for customer service they show you pictures and names for all those manning social customer service. Taking it a step further they announce who is manning Twitter customer service at any given time. When someone signs off they announce it and let followers know who will be taking over. This creates relationships, trust and some serious brand loyalty.
Read the entire article Top 10 Social Media Customer Service Tips.
Biz Tip Courtesy of The Social Media Strategies Summit Blog.
Biz Tip Provided by Tammy Sapp, Business Development/Communications Director Kalkomey Enterprises, Inc.