How to (Properly) Launch a Twitter Account for Customer Service

Your company must be prepared to interact with your customers on Twitter. Luckily, the 140-character platform has made it easy to have conversations with anyone who reaches out to your company. For example, you can have private conversations over direct message without the character count constraint. This means that when someone reaches out to your customer service team, you can quickly and easily respond with text, links, and photos to help them.

Your reps also need to be able to keep tabs on overall sentiments on Twitter about your company. Using Advanced Search, you can find out how happy your customers are — you can even search using emojis.

It’s important to put the time and energy into your Twitter customer service, especially since companies that use the site as a social care channel can see a 19 per cent increase in customer satisfaction. Furthermore, businesses with a dedicated service handle see a 10-times-better response. With a better response comes higher customer satisfaction, and with the tips in the infographic below, you can improve your Twitter customer service.

How to (Properly) Launch a Twitter Account for Customer Service

Customer Service Features on Twitter

• Private Conversations over Direct Message
  • About
    • Twitter lifted the 140-character constraint
    • Direct messages can be up to 10,000 characters
    • Can contain text, links, and photos
    • Can be sent to or received by anyone (unless an account is blocked)
      • Under Privacy and Safety you can select “Receive Direct Messages from anyone” 
  • Benefit
    • Customer service conversations often start in tweets and then transition to direct messages when personal information is required 
      • Add a deep link to your Tweets that automatically displays a call to action button
      • This allows customers to easily send a direct message
• Unfiltered Customer Feedback
  • About
    • Customers can share their opinions with your business after a service interaction
    • Receive open-ended feedback from customers
  • Benefit
    • More quantifiable way to measure the effectiveness of your customer service
    • Your business can use two industry standard question formats: 
      • Net Promoter Score (NPS®) 
        • Measured on a scale of 0-10
        • Gauge the customer’s opinion across
          • Channels
          • Contact moments 
          • Experiences
      • Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)
        • Measured on a scale of very unsatisfied to very satisfied
        • Allows you to ask customer a variety of questions
• Use sentiment filters
  • About
    • Twitter search allows you to quickly see how happy (or un-happy) your customers are
    • To include sentiment filters in your search:
      • Tick the relevant box over on the Advanced Search page 
      • Or add a happy or un-happy emoticon to the end of your search term
        • For example: “company name :(” or “company name :)”
  • Benefit
    • These tweets can offer great feedback and ideas 
• Response templates
  • About
    • Like email customer service, Twitter responses may be repetitive.
    • Collect the most commonly needed information, answers, or associated feedback to quickly respond to customer service inquiries
  • Benefit
    • You can create this template within a Google spreadsheet
    • Gives team fast access to responses that can be copied and pasted into Twitter or a social media monitoring tool
    • Saves team time
• Response time

Twitter Customer Service Tips

• 19% increase in customer satisfaction for companies that use Twitter as a social care channel 
• Have a dedicated Twitter handle for customer service
  • Companies with a dedicated handle get 10 times better response 
  • Handle should be different than your company’s main Twitter account
• 81% of consumers don’t recommend a company if they don’t receive an answer on Twitter
• 53% of consumers expect businesses to reply to their Tweets in less than an hour
• Keep responses short and friendly
  • Click the heart on a tweet to “like” it
  • Use pictures, GIFs, or emojis
• Retweet positive reviews to promote your business
  • Add a comment to the retweet to
    • Thank the customer 
    • Remind them: “Tweet us if you need anything else!”

• Use the customer’s name, not just their Twitter handle

Step Up Your Service with Technology

• Give your customer service team the right tools to create and manage cases via social media channels
• Service Cloud’s social customer service tools let your team create, edit, and track performance on most social media platforms
• Because social customer service is an integrated, seamless part of the Salesforce Customer Success Platform, your social care team gains a comprehensive picture of the customer before responding
  • This true 360-degree view of the customer empowers agents with social media engagement, in real time, on the channels where customers are talking

Conclusion

Twitter can be a huge asset when it comes to customer service. By putting in a little extra effort, you can impress customers and earn their loyalty.