Everybody likes free stuff, and with Halloween coming up, what better time than now to talk about it? After all, at Halloween, we all get – er, used to get – a sack full of free candy. Remember when you used to get home from a night of trick-or-treating, you’d dump your bag – I used a pillow case – on the family room floor, compare hauls with your friends and trade the taffy for the Reese’s peanut butter cups. Everybody likes candy, but let’s be honest: it was about 3 bucks worth of chocolate. We were excited because we got something for free. So why don’t we get excited when we look at the opportunities offered to us by social media?
Let’s talk about those opportunities. What can a site like Twitter offer you? In terms of a customer service solution, you get another channel that’s likely to be popular with your customers and an important resource for you to answer their questions and interact with them. However, you’re not going to reach everyone with your Twitter account, so you shouldn’t close the call centers quite yet. Before jumping headfirst into the social media movement, you need to do a few things to prepare yourself.
First, you need to know why you’re getting into Twitter. That it’s trendy and has been talked about a ton as a great resource for customer service isn’t why you should join. The goal of using Twitter should be to reach out to new customers and try to provide new channels of communication for consumers to learn about your brand. There’s a difference. The difference is that you can affect change if you buy into the idea of wanting to provide help to a wide audience of customers, and that you can fall flat if you expect a new piece of technology to do the work for you. Follow some of the other brands that have established themselves as innovators on Twitter.
Practical Application
Plenty of companies have embraced Twitter as a customer support mechanism, and they’re finding it’s paying dividends. Some of them have even expanded from giving customer service to offering discounts and special rates for their followers (Check this post for an example.) Here are just a few of the companies who have been commended for their service over Twitter:-Zappos
-Best Buy
-JetBlue
-ComcastWhat makes these companies different from the thousands of others that are on Twitter? Their dedication to providing quick, complete solutions and their ability to innovate keeps them out ahead. Best Buy’s enlisted over a thousand employees to answer questions posed to their “Twelpforce,” JetBlue offers “Cheeps,” cheap fares that are only available to Twitter followers.
Second, consider the social parameters of Twitter. What I mean is that social media is all about interaction, it’s about communication and a give-and-take relationship. Note that all of the brands mentioned above have personalized their service, with a face and a name on the other end of the conversation. They understand that consumers are looking for an interaction.
So this Halloween, when all of the candy is given out and traded away, think about what else you can be getting for free. Certainly that’s worth more than 3 bucks.
