Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Social Media Corner: Customer Service?

Social media for customer service? Yes, social media channels like Twitter and Facebook can be great tools for monitoring customer sentiment and fixing problems. Learn how in this month's Social Media Corner.

By Samantha Scott, APR


In public relations part of our job is to manage the relationship between our client or our employer and their audience/customers. Social media is an excellent tool to do this - in real time. In addition to Google Alerts (http://www.google.com/alerts?hl=en), social sites like Twitter, Facebook, and review sites like Yelp, Google Places and Yahoo! Local can be real assets to brand management and customer service.

A great example is Best Buy's Twelpforce. Created to empower employees to help customers, it's live on Twitter. The company also links to it from their site under customer service. Employees of Best Buy actively seek out tech and product questions/needs and respond to them.

Comast also has a team of people monitoring the web for negative posts, complaints, etc. If one is found, a team member replies and tries to resolve the issue, or they set an appointment to get the problem taken care of.

More than ever before, it's critical for businesses to manage their brand and be sure they are taking care of their customers, lest they start to lose market share. Using social sites, where people are sharing their feelings, issues, joys, etc. is ideal. If businesses LISTEN and MONITOR their brand name and account pages, they can learn what their customers like, need, hate or want. It also shows that the company CARES about what matters to the customers and goes a long way to building/maintaining critical relationships. PLUS, it's all measurable!

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