How to Optimize Your 140-Character Tweets for Customer Support

140-Characters

 If you haven’t spend 30 minutes trying to contact a call center, let me tell you this, you are one in a million. There are times when you even had to wait for several days for getting a reply to an email that you had written to an online store’s customer service department for checking your order status.

These are common situations that occur quite often and leave a sour taste in the mouth of the customers. They may feel frustrated, powerless and ignored. But the advent of social media has created a unique connectivity changing customer service drastically. Customers are no longer voiceless as before, thanks to social media.

Many customers do not like to contact privately for their problem resolution and are switching over to twitter for publicly voicing their concerns. So, it is imperative that today, social media customer service is given a high priority in your business. About 67 percent of customers have used the social media site of an organization to avail service. Approximately 33 percent of users would prefer to get in touch brands via social media and not through phones.

Moreover, Twitter is not a private platform. So when you provide good customer support, other users can actually see that. When you are known for good customer service, you have an edge over your business rivals.

So do not let your business suffer just because there is non-existent or less than adequate customer support via Twitter.

Here are some of those ways that will help you to strengthen your customer service through Twitter even though a Twitter text is restricted to only 140 characters.

 

#1. Establish a Twitter Feed Dashboard

The first step for you would be to set up an infrastructure for Twitter support. It should be done properly as tweeting consecutively with several customers may be a messy affair. After all, you do not want any consumer to do a follow-up for the same question they had asked a few days ago but you are completely clueless about their identity.

Mobile Twitter apps and native desktop are okay for the casual users. However, in a business, it makes sense to use a Twitter dashboard. A dashboard will be helpful for inviting team members, making notes and tracking conversations. Another crucial component of your setup will be to decide whether you need a distinct Twitter handle only for providing customer support and to measure the performance of your customer support team. When you have a dedicated Twitter handle for customer support, you stop your Twitter feed getting filled up with discussions about your customer complaints and issues. It is a popular strategy among corporations and software organizations that usually receive a huge volume of Tweets related to customer support.

 

#2. Never Ignore the Angry Tweets

It may be quite tempting to tune out any negative feedback that comes in for poor customer service but doing so is not good for your business. At times, even negative feedback provides you with useful insights on how to make improvements in your business. What is more important is when you ignore consumers who have tweeted, they become more frustrated. You can use the negative feedback as a great opportunity for regaining your customers and problem correction.

Twitter is an excellent platform to get the conversation started with your customers. However, if the problem gets too complicated, you must be aware of how to continue the conversation on Twitter so that inclusion of extra platforms can be avoided. It is a conversational platform that operates real-time and customers feel that their issues are heard instantly. So it does not matter even though the length of a tweet cannot exceed 140 characters.

When you are not successful in resolving an issue even after a few Tweets, you can request the concerned customer to message you directly through their email address. But, forcing them to describe their issues right at the beginning can be frustrating for them and you would not like to make the procedure complicated at all.

#3. Track Twitter Responses Made by Employees

When you have many employees who handle your customer support functions through Twitter, you must have a way for tracking which employee is giving response to which tweet. When you do that, it will enable you to be more organized and add accountability. The easy way out is to have your employees use their initials to conclude their tweets, whenever they are interacting with your customers.

#4. Prompt Response

One of the key metrics for customer support over Twitter is how quick your response time had been. In a study conducted for airlines, it was observed that the faster the airline company responded to the tweet of a user, the willingness of users to spend more money also increased. 

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