Twitter for Dummies - Laura Fitton [82]
Twitter provides all users access to influential journalists, bloggers, writers, and people from all walks of life. If you use it consistently and well, you can find powerful, inexpensive ways to share messages that help solve people’s problems and gain visibility for your work.
Customer service
Big name companies, such as Comcast and Dell, use Twitter as part of an overall strategy to reinvent their reputations for poor customer service and turn things around for their brands.
How did they do it? Or, more importantly, how can you do it? Both companies set up Twitter accounts (@ComcastCares and all the Dell accounts listed at http://dell.com/twitter) as hubs for public customer-service responses. They got in the trenches of social media through Twitter and engaged their customer bases by facing criticisms and complaints head-on, and by showing a desire to help and respond quickly without making excuses or shifting blame. Better yet, Twitter users around the world can witness this transformation and watch the companies respond to others’ complaints, improving the company image for even more people.
By listening diligently for mentions of their companies and quickly extending a helping hand, Comcast and Dell have generated substantial goodwill (not to mention, press coverage). Even when the products and services sold under those brands elicit unpleasant reactions from the public, having a real person reach out to help in a public forum can do a lot to prevent or dissipate consumer anger. Used artfully, one-to-one contact via Twitter instills a sense of hope that the people behind the company walls aren’t leaving customers hanging. Presence and timely response on Twitter can make the difference between a firestorm of complaints and a quickly-managed situation.
Here’s the caveat: No one has yet figured out whether Twitter-based customer service will still be such a great shortcut once Twitter grows even bigger and more popular. If the company’s customer service system has fundamental problems, remaining in closer contact with consumers alone will not fix that. Customer service on Twitter allows businesses to catch consumers in their moments of frustration and help them right away. But Twitter alone can’t fix back-end customer-service infrastructure problems such as overloaded call centers or poorly trained representatives who have no real power to help.
You don’t need to be a huge company (and you certainly don’t need to be suffering from a bad reputation) to create an effective business presence on Twitter. Twitter provides a great customer-service channel for small and medium-sized businesses, too. If you’re at a small company, Twitter can broaden your ability to reach out widely and listen carefully at almost no expense (only some time and possibly tools) while saving you the cost of having an entire customer-service department. Having a Twitter account for your business can make your business more accessible, not to mention let you help people in real time who have real problems and see instant improvement in how consumers perceive your business.
Zappos (www.zappos.com), a sweetheart of the Twitter-for-business world, models an almost perfect implementation of the ideas laid out in The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business As Usual, by Christopher Locke (@clockerb), Rick Levine (@ricklevine), Doc Searls (@dsearls), and David Weinberger (@dweinberger) (Basic Books). At Zappos, employees literally have a mandate to create delightful experiences for customers. The catchphrase? “Deliver happiness.” Each employee who may come in contact with customers is encouraged and empowered to do whatever it takes to help. This policy holds true throughout the company’s interactions, but the Zapponian culture of helpfulness absolutely