Once upon a time if you were dissatisfied with the service you received from a company, you could call and call and call, write letters, maybe even vent to a few friends or neighbors. You might be turned off by your experience and never use the company’s services again, but short of taking out an ad in the New York Times, not many other people were going to be affected by your experience. Now in the age of instant communication, social media, and services like
Twitter, companies know that if you’re not happy, you can publicly share your frustration and dissatisfaction in less than a minute.
With the rise in popularity of Twitter, all it takes is 140 characters or less to sound off about a company, a product, or a service. And those few words can make a big impact. Companies are beginning to realize the effect negative "tweets" can have on their brand and have begun to monitor the "twittersphere" for mention of their name. Many have also become engaged with customers through tweets of their own, responding to customers and reaching out to communicate with them. Twitter has become a new avenue for social CRM and a cost efficient method of providing high levels of customer service.
As Andrew Heining noted in Twitter as Customer Service Shortcut, 'even if you can’t find your [least] favorite company on Twitter, tweeting about a less-than-stellar customer service experience could get you traction. As the service has taken off – now up to more than 8 million users – brands have begun to pay attention to the impact of negative buzz…"
The power of Twitter may be a better guarantee of customer satisfaction because customers know they now have the means to make their dissatisfaction publicly known.
But as Sarah Perez explains in
How To Get Customer Service via Twitter, companies shouldn’t let customer complaints get that far:
"While it's nice to know that Twitter is available as a way of getting a company's attention, all methods of customer service and support should be treated with the same consideration. By pouncing on the Twitter complaints while ignoring the emails, one has to wonder if the company is, in fact, more concerned with reputation than they are with service."
There are many companies monitoring for and responding to comments made about their company on Twitter. Companies such as Comcast, Southwest Airlines, Wells Fargo, Jet Blue, and plenty others are actively engaging with customers online, but this form of customer communication can’t take the place of more traditional methods of customer service. As Perez explains, often Twitter is a last ditch effort to express dissatisfaction and try to get a company to respond.
Brent Leary, in his article
The Tweet Is Mightier Than The Sword, explains how Twitter and other forms of social media should be used to enhance customer service, rather than be used as a replacement for more traditional methods:
"Social CRM is not a substitute for traditional CRM. Instead, what emerges is a new, outward-facing dimension that extends the operational areas of CRM. That new dimension is inevitably more successful if you're building off a strong foundation in traditional CRM."
