Today’s guest post is written by Kyle Simpson. Kyle writes for Medical Coding Certification where you can find more information about a career and training in the medical field.
If you think that a call center somewhere in India and an email address are the only ways to provide customer service for your business, you are woefully un-invested in the social networking revolution. In fact, many corporations (large and small) are turning to social networking (from online community forums to blog posts to tweeting) to handle a larger volume of customer concerns at far less cost to the company. And here a few ways you can jump on the bandwagon and take a leap into the 21st century.
- Blog posts. Much like the FAQ page on your website, setting up a blog is a great way to not only reach out to your customers (to address their concerns en masse), it also provides an excellent interface for feedback. If you write a post about an issue, customers can get up-to-date information as well as provide input on the issue (how it has affected them, what solutions they found, any help they got, etc.). It can decrease your company’s call log by a significant margin.
- Community forums. The best thing about using this versatile tool is that you really don’t have to do any work. Certainly you can have a company representative or technician monitor the forum and chime in if and when necessary, but people who frequent forums often do so for the purpose of trading and sharing information, and they do so freely (at no expense to you). If many customers encounter the same issue, a few will undoubtedly have a solution to broadcast to all.
- Online chats. This is an extremely effective communicative tool in many ways. For starters, the only thing most people want is to talk to a real person rather than getting stuck in automated phone hell for an hour or waiting two days for an email response. Chatting blends the best of both phone and internet resources by combining human interaction with the ability to post scripted answers that users can copy and paste instead of trying to memorize or jot them down.
- Twitter. This is literally instant access to information. One tweet has the capacity to reach millions of customers at the speed of light in order to keep them updated on any ongoing issues. Rather than calling in or flooding your inbox, let them follow up-to-the-minute notifications, making everyone’s life easier and ultimately keeping your customers happy.
- Social networking sites. If you don’t yet have a fan page on Facebook, get on it. Nothing humanizes your customer service quicker than adding people as “friends”. You can post updates and information, feature reviews, advertise products, and build up your reputation with a vital demographic.
There are many ways to use social networking to your advantage in business, but providing excellent customer service is the key to building and maintaining a solid clientele in our fast-paced, consumer-driven economy. If you don’t understand the flexibility of social networking as a means of connecting with your customers, you should learn it quickly, because you can be assured, that’s exactly what your competition is doing.
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This is a great post. Companies need to embrace and harness the social web to engage with their customers. As the writer said, because if you don’t your competition will and already is doing.
Great post Mike! Very succinctly captured the benefits of using social media to improve customer service. As you note, social media provides new channels of interaction between customers/companies, but furthermore it enables more proactive service, customer self-service and enhanced community building. It can be hugely powerful when embraced, but very damaging if ignored or neglected. We have a few a few interesting videos and articles on this very subject that may be of interest to those looking to improve customer service through social media: http://bit.ly/aS9nEh
I think there are so many B2B firms who are totally missing a great opportunity in social media. The opportunity is to create an “informal” customer service. By assigning their product engineers or product/service experts to just stay on the forums while they work their regular jobs, they have a great opportunity to create much more authentic connections to customers – which is much more valuable than having customers “talk” (not connect) with customer service reps trained by PR hacks.