The opportunity to publicly mention companies on Twitter has made a great pressure-applying tool for customers. It is impossible for brands to ignore comments, complaints or requests from customers on this social network, which has quickly become a preferred channel for Customer Relations. According to the 2015 Harris Interactive study, 78% of customers think that the presence of advisers on Twitter shows them how much the brand takes their concerns into account. 68% of the customers who had a satisfactory exchange with the brand would buy from them again in the future.
Here are our good practices for optimising your Customer Relations on Twitter.
1. Respect the codes of Twitter
Although tweets must be a maximum of 140 characters, direct messages are no longer limited. Make the most of this and use DMs wherever possible! DMs enable you to have a deeper exchange and get the confidential information necessary to deal with the query (customer reference number, telephone, invoice number…).
@Juveyy_Mohamed Our sincere apologies for the inconvenience. Let us know your User ID via DM for further checking. Thank you.
— Ooredoo Maldives (@OoredooMaldives) August 8, 2016
Retweet positive reviews that mention your company and thank the author. These retweets add value to your customer service, give you visibility and improve your image among your customers and prospects.
@j_bertho YES! Nice work, Jonathan! If you need anything at all, feel free to mention #BufferSupport -Halie pic.twitter.com/0EkgkBxNAK
— Buffer (@buffer) August 7, 2016
2. Enrich your replies
In your responses, try not to redirect the customer to your website. Instead, try to deal with their query on the channel on which they chose to contact you. Finally, remember that a picture paints a thousand words. Do not hesitate to share a photo or visual in order to deal with the query more easily.
To personalise exchanges between customers and advisers, sign all messages. You should also use a less formal tone than via email, while remaining polite. Emoticons, gifs and punctuation enable you to add a friendly touch and defuse conversations that have got off to a bad start.
@alolliecake Eep! Up for sharing where we were lagging, Lollie? ? -Julia
— Buffer (@buffer) August 8, 2016
3. Use a customer interaction management tool
According to the Harris Interactive study, 79% of users expect a response in under an hour. To achieve this reaction time, the best option is to choose a tool dedicated to managing customer interactions. This tool will enable you to centralise all client queries from Twitter on one comprehensive platform. You can filter messages that are not related to Customer Relations and define categories to route messages towards the appropriate department. These kinds of solutions often offer suggested responses and access to customer files, which are updated in real time. You can also make the most of advanced statistics to evaluate your performance.
All this information will enable you to help your advisers to guarantee the appropriate follow-up and to become more effective.
So what about you – are you looking after your customers on Twitter?
Originally published Aug 08, 2016, updated Dec 30, 2022
