Twitter, Customer Service, and Good Brand Management

If monitoring conversations and knowing what you're listening for is the first ingredient in good online best practices, knowing when and how to respond is much more than good etiquette. It's become an integral aspect of brand management and can mean the difference between a flop - or worse, a crisis - and a deposit in your company's reputation bank.

It's easy to dismiss Twitter's usefulness as a tool.

That is until you figure out that on Twitter you can find mentions of your brand and you can actually connect with customers directly and provide a first line of response. Chances are, that in 140 characters, you won't be able to do much more. But don't underestimate the importance of that public gesture.

How to use Twitter for customer service

Many companies started integrating customer service on Twitter. This list I created is purely for customer service, but there is another important aspect of customer support, which is why in many companies there is a community evangelist role carved out.

There are also individuals who opted into community builder roles - some in official capacity for an organization, some because that's who they are. Go ahead and promote your many customer support people on Twitter by creating a list.

Ben Parr at Mashable wrote a handy post about using Twitter for customer service. As he says, it's ideal because:

• You can respond to a customer question or complaint immediately after seeing it without needing to have all the facts - take the problem solving part off line. Monitoring and responding is lightening fast, and right now it will cast you in a good light, especially if your normal customer service channels are in need of repair.

• You can be proactive and let your customers know where to find you - I started a list linked above, let me know if you'd like me to add your company's team to it. This will ease some anxiety over which number to call or being on hold. Provided you don't take two days to get back to them as I described here.

• You provide the added bonus of good service/product stewardship, which in turns creates a nice halo for your company and brands. Let's face it, Twitter is the most social of social networks. People have the opportunity to humanize the brand experience over time by being helpful and personal. I do wonder if companies are developing Twitter scripts? 

How do you track tweets?

There are many tools you can use to track customer conversations on Twitter. For free, you could:

• Search for key terms or your company name with Twitter Search
• Build a Yahoo! Pipe (watch the how to video here) - here's an example of how Salesforce.com uses the tool
• Get email Twitter alerts with TweetBeep
• Use TweetScan to search for key words combined with a user
• Test drive monitoring up to three key words in real time with Monitter
• Distinguish positive from negative tweets with Twitrrater
• Look up who's following you in TwitterKarma
• Try Twittervision to see the global nature of this tool
• Look up daily top influencers on Twitterholic - expect to see more tools on influence
• Find and filter content by influence with PostRank
• Find out how many times a term was mentioned with TweetVolume
• Set up Google Alerts for the terms you want to monitor - you can route them to your email, or your RSS reader
• Use Social Mention for alerts on social media sites
• Track and rank the URLs people are talking about on with Twitturl
• Use Hashtags to learn what's happening right now
• Find a list of regular chats on Twitter

As it's the case with tools, your objectives will determine which ones are most useful to you.

Online monitoring is broader than Twitter. WebWorkerDaily pulled together some advice on how to make a monitoring dashboard to track online conversations. As Dawn explains, the real magic is in the content you're monitoring - your strategy and goals should come first.

For a fee, and for more than just monitoring in many instances, you can utilize:

• Radian6 - which allows you to set up a dashboard to monitor mentions across sites and tools and shows you brand sentiment, along with location, and integrating with WebTrends and SalesForce.com
• RapLeaf - helps you understand your customers better, simplify online media planning, enhance customer databases, and manage fraud risk
• BrandsEye - for monitoring online reputation and tracking negative sentiment
• ScoutLabs - web-based application that tracks social media and provides you with data on sentiment, trend spotting, buzz trend, share of voice, email alerts, customer rants and raves, as well as a platform to coordinate your response, assign tasks, add comments, and share product and marketing ideas
• Cymfony - collects all forms of content, organizes and categorizes it, and provides a powerful but easy-to-use interface with data visualization and discovery features that allow you to gain valuable insights from selected discussion most relevant to your brand
• BuzzLogic - technology platform identifies and organizes the conversation universe, combining both conversation-topic and audience to help brands reach more than 44 million users who are passionate on everything from the latest tech craze and cloud computing to parenthood and politics
• Spiral16 - for monitoring, collecting, and measuring the social media conversations, semantic analysis, conversation sentiment, and visualizing data in a 3D mapping so you can better understand the hubs of influencers (based on linkages) and how a message is potentially being spread

Customer service = brand management in social media

More and more companies are discovering the power of being first line responders on Twitter for customer issues. Microsoft just announced that it is joining Twitter with their own support channel. There are many examples of great brand management through customer service. Matt has aggregated a few.

And if you think that one customer with two followers may not be all that important, think again. Analysts and journalists are increasingly participating actively and may pick up on a random conversation - all of a sudden, you could have what we've come to call the Streisand Effect.

So don't jump to rash conclusion. Instead, jump on Twitter and join the customer conversation. Even if your customers are not there yet, chances are that those who talk about your company and brand on Twitter will come up in search - as in search engine search [hat tip Louis Gray].

Plus, you could start from a less than ideal position and turn things around to the point that your company develops a well though-out Twitter strategy, complete with customer segmented offers like Dell did.

[image by Neuro Productions Twitter Browser]

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Related posts:

You're on Twitter, now What?

Twitter: Macro Insights from Micro Interactions

Business Uses for Twitter

© 2006-2009 Valeria Maltoni. All rights reserved.

Comments

[John Spennce]

Very, very helpful post - thank you so much Valeria!

[Eric Melin]

Hi Valeria-

Thanks for mentioning Spiral16 in your list of online monitoring dashboards. Identifying influencers is so key to brand success and having a well thought out Twitter plan can only come from the knowledge you gain in that area. Great post!

Eric Melin
@Spiral16

[Russ Henneberry]

This post is a great resource. I think the notion of simply responding to a customer service issue via Twitter is powerful. Taking the actual handling of the issue off line is a great piece of advice... the short 140 character response is just to show that you are listening. Thanks for the insight.

[Valeria Maltoni]

@John - curious as to how specifically it's helpful (always looking to turn data points into action for future reference ;)

@Eric - thank you for stopping by. Yes, I took a look at your dashboard courtesy of Kelly Kearney a few weeks back and this was the perfect place for it.

@Russ - exactly. It shows (good) attitude and intent. It shows the company is listening and wants to do something about it.

[Mitch Lieberman]

Valeria,

First, very useful post, lots of great information. My comments are specific to Customer Service and Twitter. It is an interesting channel for communication and escalation, but it I think that more often than not masks a problem. Here is what I posted on my blog:

"The need to broadcast a problem to the world would not be necessary if the customer had confidence that their issue would be solved timely and to their satisfaction."

So, monitoring and watching is certainly important, but often masks another issue:

"If your customers are trying to get your attention on Twitter to solve a specific ‘me only’ problem, your processes are either horribly inefficient, broken or you have product issues."

The exception to this are companies (like JetBlue) who are prepared and ready to handle direct requests sent to twitter and it is considered just another channel.

In summary, yes it is important do what you suggest - but, more importantly to understand why you are doing it and fix the root cause.

Mitch
http://mjayliebs.wordpress.com

[John Moore]

Great post. The biggest topic of side conversation today has been about setting up and deploying social within your company.

My viewpoint, both from the narrow Social Support Community (SSC), and from the broader social business strategy perspective, is that this must be jointly owned by customer service and marketing. This joint ownership can best leverage the tools discussed and strategies to provide customers with the best experience possible.

Keep up the great writing, always great stuff.

[Mary Ann Halford]

Valeria,

You always do great posts, but you outdid yourself with this one!

I have already shared this post with people already and will continue to share it . . . it is a great resource for businesses starting to use Twitter as a customer service tool.

All this being said, the business managers using these tools and venturing into this space are still the minority. From my perspective, there are challenges in getting managers and their employees up to speed on the power of all these resources. . . .

Fortunately, there are great writers and thought leaders like you that can help them make the challenges easier to manage . . .

[Valeria Maltoni]

@Mitch - agree with you that companies need to fix the problem, which is often embedded in the regular customer service channels. Having said that, I believe there is a proactive role that marries with the social business where customer service has a legitimate reason to be involved.

@John - interesting exchange here and on Twitter. Thank you for getting involved. As you'll have the opportunity to see tomorrow, I believe that there's a broader conversation organizations need to have with the marketplace. And yes, marketing and customer service are natural partners. I know for a fact, that some organizations are integrating the two.

@Mary Ann - thank you so much for the feedback and for sharing the information. Glad you found the post helpful. Often we can be more persuasive by sharing the work of others in our organizations - funny how that happens.

[Jamie Favreau]

Thank you for this list. I knew of some of these but I hadn't heard of all of them. Knowledge is power and it is good to learn from someone who has been there and done that.

Thanks for coming to Detroit too!

[Stewart Given]

Twitter should look at this post themselves and apply some of its suggestions as their own customer service is woeful.

I've only waited some 3 months (and counting!) for a response from Twitter support.

[Robert Phillips]

This is the first time I heard of using twitter for customer service. I know that twitter is used for marketing, business, search, etc. This post is remarkable. I gained immense knowledge after reading this post .Also increased some knowledge about how to use twitter tools to keep track of tweets. I already know some tools but, here there is lot of useful information to be known. Thanks for sharing this amazing article.

[Lauren Vargas]

Valeria,

This post is a great resource for an organization considering the jump from monitoring/listening to customer engagement. It is important to note, that while an organization may have a community team, the participation/engagement should be enterprise-wide. Some organizations are experimenting with an operator/social media traffic coordinator to ensure the interaction with the customer/prospect occurs with the right person in the organization.

Thank you for including us in the list of tools/resources!

Lauren Vargas
Community Manager at Radian6
@VargasL