Enhance Customer Service, Marketing and Online Reputation Management: Part 1

This post is a mash up of two previous posts with some new information. This is about using all the information resources available on the web to enhance your brand and customer service, but, the emphasis will be on social networks. Why social networks? Well, consider that the basis of social networks is building communities of friends and other like-minded individuals. And, there's not enough time to get into all the other informational resources!

Let's focus on Twitter as a tool to enhance your customer service, marketing and online reputation management. From a customer service standpoint, you can use Twitter to monitor all the mentions of your brand and get a pulse on how people interact with your brand. To make this easy on yourself, use Summize to quickly search all the mentions of your brand. Type in your brand and see if any conversations pop-up. If Summize returns results for your brand then you should be flattered (if all positive) that people talk about the brand. If you don't get any returns, then its a marketing opportunity which will be discussed in the next post.

Assuming you see conversations about your brand, quickly go over the conversations and get a feel for what people are saying and how they interact with the brand. There's nothing like an unmoderated and candid forum to gauge how much people like what you do or offer. Its inevitable people will have some negative comment to make and that should be an opportunity for you to make good. After all, customers remember you most when you make a bad situation a positive one. If you find a negative comment, reach out to that individual and let him/her know you want to make good on the negative experience they had and invite them to email/call you at their convenience to hash out the issue. After you take care of the situation and the person is happy, ask them to mention it on Twitter and give them an incentive to move quickly (i.e. free shipping on next order).

Roll this out slowly and build on your experiences. Create a plan of action that addresses who is responsible for checking Twitter/Summize, how often it will be done, customer follow up and reporting. Its important that an individual is assigned this task and they are given guidelines for customer follow ups, empowered to act quickly and have the ability to report on resolution (i.e. SugarCRM).

This is an opportunity to engage customers in another medium and show the importance you place on their ongoing experiences with your brand.