What’s more frustrating for a customer than trying to connect with a company regarding service, and that company keeps redirecting the customer to various departments? Or, how about once the customer is finally connected with a real person, the service is handled either incompletely, incorrectly, or both?
What is a disgruntled customer to do?
More and more customers are reaching out to connect with companies via social media. As a result of this, virtually any company who deals with customers should have some kind of presence on social media.
How angry do you get when you get terrible customer service?
Now is the time to define ‘presence’ on social media. ‘Presence’ does not mean the company simply has a Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn account. ‘Presence’ means that the company has people on their staff who ‘get’ practical social media. They need people whoknow how to monitor, strategize and use social media to enhance the customer service for that company, as well as the having the ability to build authority for that company and their brand.
In other words, the company must have an active and knowledgeable social media person or team in order to have an effective social media presence. After all, a company doesn’t want a disgruntled customer to tweet to their hundreds or thousands of followers something like this:
“Epic #fail 4 @companyname Was just told it would take 2 wks to correct phone#/message. Unable to receive messages/incoming calls in meantime.”
Those 140 characters or less in Twitter can do a LOT of damage for the company’s customer relationship. And what company wants their name or brand linked to the words “epic fail”?
Time to look at a couple of companies who use social media correctly.
Take Facebook for instance. Facebook has integrated Survey Monkey for their fan page survey. This gives Facebook information they can use in discovering how Facebook users integrate with different brands or companies.
Another company who uses social media correctly is AT&T Customer Care on Twitter. Right off the bat AT&T says “AT&Ts social media care teams (https://twitter.com/ATTCustomerCare/teams) are here to help you. For more online assistance, visit http://support.att.com.” By having a Twitter account and actively and correctly using it, AT&T engages their customers, builds authority for their brand, and knows that customers with a good experience will Tweet this experience to their hundreds or thousands of followers. A case of simple inbound marketing.
If your company is on social media but does not know how to use it effectively, or doesn’t have a social media presence at all, it’s now time to step forward.
