3 Twitter Tips For Loving (And Supporting) Your Customers

by Dan Martell on Dec 31, 2009
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(John Flinchbaugh)

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The idea of loving your customers or scaling caring is not new. However the tools we have at our disposal are i.e. Twitter (o.k. well newish).

With that in mind, here are 3 Twitter tips you can try, that will improve the amount of love and support you give your customers.

1. Respond to your competitors complaints

If you’re competitors customers are having issues, why not help them out. On the surface this sounds counter intuitive, but it’s not. If done right (don’t slam anyone) the impact can be huge. Read how Seemic did it here.

2. Connect your team with your customers

In a recent keynote by Jeremiah Owyang, he proclaimed that your customers do not care what department you’re in. They just want problems solved, and questions answered.

One way you could do this (and how we do it) is to monitor who signs up [with a social profile] and if any employee has an affinity for that customers interest, they might say something on Twitter.

3. Aggregating Twitter conversations

Sometimes when you correspond with a customer, they’ll need to be transitioned to support. We handle this with Twitter search, by pulling the conversation together, and then handing it off to support (cc’ing our customer).

Remember: At the end of the day, it’s all about the people.

Do you have any other tips for loving and supporting your customers?

  • http://prettygirlsays.wordpress.com/ Sarah Keeling

    Great post Dan! I'd actually add another one that I think is overlooked, which is showing gratitude to customers who sing your praise. Best Buy customer service is great at this, in particular the @rewardzone team. BBY customers are so passionate – at least I am – that when I bought a new printer/scanner on almost all my reward zone points and tweeted about it, they replied to me publicly with a thank you for my loyalty. It felt GREAT to have my praise acknowledged instead of just my whining and went a long way for my perception of the company.

    (check out my tweet from @sarahjkeeling earlier today about how excited i am about @aviahotels in savannah. no reply. @hotwire didn't respond either. big missed opportunity to engage in my book.)

    Speaking of BBY though, they also really nicely handle #2 above. When we had to change the shipping address on a package we ordered online, the phone support team couldn't do it, so we tweeted asking for help, then looked into it via direct message, and voila, the package shipping address was corrected.

  • http://www.flowtown.com Dan Martell

    Thanks Sarah! Really appreciate your comment.

    Another way we show love for our twitter followers giving love, is favoritting their tweets. We do this, then feature them on our site.

    Obviously we can do more by engaging – which we do – but I love your suggestions.

    Thanks again.

  • http://www.wearelistening.org/ Lior

    Excellent post, Dan. Thank you for supporting your ideas with links to relevant and compelling information on the subject.

  • http://twitter.com/BLueSS Jon

    Another tip: When you're supposed to use the number 3, don't use the number 4.

  • http://ethanbloch.com ethan

    Thank you for pointing out… fixed ;-)

  • http://twitter.com/BLueSS Jon

    Another tip: When you're supposed to use the number 3, don't use the number 4.

  • http://ethanbloch.com ethan

    Thank you for pointing out… fixed ;-)

  • http://workwithsusanna.com/ workwithsusanna

    Great information. Engaging on Twitter is so important!

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