Twitter customer support: 67% of consumers in the U.S. use social media for customer support. Their weapon of choice, Twitter.
Social media is an amazing tool for brands and marketers to push their brands to new heights. The fast, free, and unrestricted access give them an opportunity to appeal to consumers globally. But aside from an effective marketing tool, social media platforms can also be a great customer support mechanism.
While social media platforms give brands an opportunity to appeal to larger audience sizes, the same goes for consumers. They too can easily get in touch with the brand or their choice. Today, social media users expect a quick response to their complaints and Twitter is one of the best platforms to use for such conversations.
Over 90% of global brands have built their presence on Twitter. Also, the precise and fast pasted nature of the platform makes it the ideal choice for customers looking to resolve their issues. This is why it’s extremely important to know how you can enhance your Twitter customer service.
Why is Twitter customer support so important?
Twitter is a fast-paced social media platform that allows users it have real-time conversations. Also, the 280 character limitation leads to precise and meaningful conversation. This makes Twitter the ideal platform for users to reach out to a brand. Tweeting gives voice to customers, raise their issues, and get quick resolutions.
Twitter customer support doesn’t always have to be about quickly resolving issues and complaints. Even getting a quick response related to their issues can make the difference. But it’s extremely important that none of these conversations go ignored. You never know which tweet may go trending and lead to a social media crisis.
11 Tips for an effective Twitter customer support strategy
Now that you understand the significance of Twitter in customer support, let’s discuss some tips that can help you enhance your customer support strategy.
1. Determine your strategy
The first thing you need to figure out before you get started is what works for your brand. Second, you need to ensure appointing the right individuals to take the lead for customer support. If you already have a community manager he/she is the most fitting person to take the lead.
The community manager is already used to engaging with the customers and knows the best way to respond to them. The community manager can teach your support teams how to respond to consumers in different scenarios. Also, it would be best to leave your main account to the community manager to manage if you have multiple Twitter accounts.
2. Create a separate Twitter customer support account
You have to post content to promote your brand and keep the users engaged. This further draws interaction for your followers. While it is easier for accounts to track conversations that have a couple of thousand followers, the same cannot be said for brands with thousands if not millions of followers. You might miss important customer support queries that can result in losing customers or worse a social media crisis.
It’s best to create a separate Twitter account that customers can use just to reach out to you and resolve their issues with ease.
3. Track all brand mentions
Social media users often use various platforms to connect with brands, the most prominent being Twitter. But these users don’t always mention your Twitter handle in their conversations. Although, they do mention you’re your brand in your tweets. You can use Twitter advanced search to search for tweets by using different combinations of your brand name or product.
However, for brands that have a humongous follower base, manually foin through each conversation and trying out various combinations can be way too time-consuming. They can use Twitter analytics too instead to track all conversations mentioning their brand. This way you can find customer complaints and analyze the public opinion of your brand, product, or service.
4. Make sure to respond quickly
We’re so sorry for any trouble and frustration with your membership. Please shoot us a DM with your email on file and we’d be happy to look into this further for you.
— ClassPass (@classpass) June 30, 2021
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Social media platforms give users the ability to connect with brands in real-time. Hence, they also expect brands to respond to them in a timely manner. If the brands don’t do so, they risk losing their customers. Remember, brands don’t always have to provide an immediate solution. Simply moving the conversation ahead or trying to know more about their issue. Doing so can make the customer feel valued and may stick to your brand even with his/her not-so-great first experience with your brand.
5. Stick to your brand voice
Many brands use a formal tone while responding to customer complaints on social media. While a formal tone worked in the olden days, it can diminish the customer support experience of your brand. Today’s generation prefers a more casual tone while interacting with brands and also expects the same from the brand. Furthermore, this makes it easier for users to engage with your brand and in cases of customer support, enhances the overall experience.
6. Know when to take conversations private
Even if the conversations on Twitter are fast-paced and to-the-point, you won’t be able to resolve every customer issue in 280 characters. Some issues may require you to communicate multiple times and require a more detailed description which is not possible with just 280 characters. Also, some issues may require the customer to reveal private information such as phone number or email which the customer may not be want to reveal in public.
In such cases, it’s best to take conversations off-platform. You can ask the customer to connect with DMs or by email.
7. Reach out to your competitor’s customers
Each of your competitor’s customers with issues that they have failed to identify or reply to is an opportunity for you. As the customer is interested in the products related to your industry and your competitor has failed to meet their expectations, you can step in to fulfill that role. They are potential customers that you can target.
8. Respond and learn from negative feedback
Hi, sorry to hear about this. Which version of Photoshop are you using and on which OS? Would you mind restoring the app preferences & see if it helps? See: https://t.co/ulJI7cGn1G You may want to backup your settings beforehand: https://t.co/4dX7gkr36D Thanks, ^AK
— Adobe Care (@AdobeCare) July 1, 2021
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Make sure to respond to all conversations related to your brand, even if they are negative. Ignoring negative feedback can lead to disasters and you will surely lose the customers. You never know which conversation may gain traction and go viral. In the case of negative feedback, it can result in a social media crisis.
Accept your mistake and try improving in the areas your product or service lacks so it doesn’t happen again.
9. Measure the effectiveness of your customer support teams
Analyzing the effectiveness of your support teams can help you identify areas of improvement. You can analyze how well your customer support staff responds to customers on social media and take measures to improve if needed.
10. Prepare FAQs
Analyze all the previous customer complaints that you get. This will help you identify the most recurring complaints. You can then prepare FAQs in advance to prepare your Twitter customer support teams for all possible customer interactions in advance.
11. Personalize the experience
We’ll have to tell our boss that we have no choice but to keep tweeting nonsense because lives depend on it.
— innocent drinks (@innocent) June 28, 2021
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
One of the ways to distinguish your brand’s customer support is by making your followers realize that it’s run by real people and not bots. Depending on how your overall brand voice is structured, you can take different approaches: for example, you could refer to your team as “we,” sign off messages with initials or names, and use conversational language when appropriate.
Closing Thoughts
These 11 tips will help you piece together an effective customer support strategy and enhance the quality of customer interactions with your brand. Take advantage of TrackMyHashtag’s features to track and monitor all conversations related to your brand. It can help you enhance your social media presence and help build an engaging follower base.
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