Twitter for Customer Satisfaction

Now that customer satisfaction is a priority for businesses, companies are looking for ways to directly address customer satisfaction needs. One idea that experts have put forth is integrating Twitter into the customer satisfaction process, utilizing the social media tool to gain access to customers. While Twitter itself is a questionable tool for marketing, it may be a far more valuable tool for customer satisfaction.

In fact, it has its uses in almost every type of business, no matter which customers you’re serving, their demographics, or even their willingness to use the Twitter platform. As long as you are open minded towards the many customer-satisfaction uses of Twitter, you’ll find that there are all types of possibilities open to you.

Use 1: Coupons/Specials The easiest way to use Twitter to boost customer satisfaction is to create coupons and specials that are announced on Twitter to all your followers. Customers and prospective customers love getting these deals, especially if they’re truly a good deal and not some gimmick such as “5% off your next drink.” If you are willing to offer great deals on Twitter, you’ll find that you receive more followers that utilize your service and enjoy the great benefits that the deals you post offer. Use 2: Company News If you’re wondering why a customer cares about company news, you’re asking a valid question.

Most customers don’t care if you hire a new employee, reach a sales goal, or change something that doesn’t affect the customer experience. But not all news is internally related. If you’re adding new products that you know are going to make customers happy, announcing it on Twitter notifies every customer that reads your Tweet about the change, hopefully helping them get excited about what their experiences will be like in the future.

Use 3: Games/Contests While not every company would benefit from integrating games and contests on their Twitter account, businesses that cater to a younger generation may find that interesting games, contests, and prizes gets them involved with your company, and that level of involvement will presumably improve satisfaction overall. Use 4: Retweets When you retweet something one of your customers says – whether it’s about your company, or something humorous, or something otherwise worth retweeting, you build a bond between not only yourself and the customer – you also build a bond between yourself and all of the customers that know that if they say something worth retweeting your company will make them temporarily famous. It’s a small change, and usually only affects one or two customers at a time, but it can build a fairly strong bond with those customers.

Use 5: General Engagement It’s crucial that you have someone with people skills and the ability to type coherently with humor and professionalism run your corporate customer service Twitter account, but provided you find someone that has all of those qualities, you have the opportunity to engage with the customer and bond with them on a personal level. The person in charge of your Twitter account isn’t a person – it’s a representation of your company, and with it you’re creating friends and satisfaction in a way that will ultimately help boost satisfaction with your customers. Use 6: Customer Service Portal Another excellent use of Twitter is to utilize it as a customer portal.

Allow customers and clients to ask you questions, provide feedback, rant, or otherwise communicate with your company. You’ll be surprised how often the key to customer service is simply being available, and how much easier it may be to answer questions via Twitter than in person when the confrontation alone can cause people issues. Similarly, you can respond to multiple people instantly rather than one at a time, and if others have the same questions or comments they can find their answer in the history of your Twitter account.

Twitter may not be the greatest tool in the world for businesses, but it does make an excellent customer service portal at the very minimum, provided you have someone of knowledge in charge of the account to handle customer issues. Use 7: Actively Address Customer Concerns Another forgotten use of Twitter is to actively address customer concerns. You can search Twitter for any mentions of your company name or any of your major products (provided you have a unique enough name to locate them in a search).

From there, you can address the customer issue directly, either through a direct message or by responding to their Tweet in some way that provides excellent customer service. For example, if the customer receives a broken product and is expressing their frustration, you can find that Tweet, respond to it with an offer to return it or fix it for free, and suddenly everyone will see the excellent customer service you provide. Few companies take advantage of this type of active customer satisfaction system, but the results can be fairly strong.

Twitter isn’t the greatest tool in the world, and certainly the person you hire to run it has to be excellent at their job for it to be worthwhile, but as you can see from this article, there are several reasons to believe that Twitter can help you improve customer service if you use it correctly.