5 Ways to Scale Your Twitter Support
WAY S
INTRODUCTION
More customers are turning to social networks like Twitter for everything from product recommendations to technical support to locating the best deals. Just as many customers are using the same channels to voice their opinions about your company’s people, policies, products and services — both good and bad.
Twitter says that on average 460,000 new accounts are created daily and 1 billion tweets are sent every week. Add to that one billion Facebook users who collectively make 300,000 status updates every minute. Is this volume of interactions manageable today? How manageable will it be a year from now? Do you even have a social CRM strategy?
AUTOMATION’S PLACE IN SOCIAL CRM
Social networking is all about conversations and engagement. On the surface, automating a channel like Twitter might look like a risky proposition. However, used wisely and with the right technology and application design, it can be a strong competitive advantage and can drive customer acquisition and loyalty by helping you more quickly engage followers, identify opportunities and defuse problems.
Note that with Twitter you do not have to completely automate a Twitter account but instead can use automation to augment human agents and ultimately get information to customers as fast as possible. Consider the case where someone sends a tweet to your corporate account saying they are having a problem with your product. An automated application can look at that tweet and determine whether all the information required for a human agent is present. For example, with a software application did the customer include the version number of the product and the operating system? If not, the automated agent can reply back to the person via Twitter and collect that information so that when the human agent is ready to respond he or she has all the information necessary to get the customer a complete response.
What opportunities are you missing?
460,000
new Twitter accounts are created daily
1 billion
tweets are sent every week
1 billion
Facebook users and growing
300,000
Facebook status updates every minute
-Here are 5 ways you can use automation today to
enhance and scale your Twitter support.
1.
MANAGE YOUR CORPORATE TWITTER ACCOUNT
Having a dedicated staff monitor your corporate Twitter account (@companyname) around the clock may be difficult today and will only become more challenging as Twitter usage grows. By using automation and application logic, you can quickly acknowledge and respond to mentions or replies where appropriate or alert staff via SMS when a human response is needed. This type of automation is useful for ensuring an important tweet isn’t overlooked, as well as for covering night and weekend hours when staff is not actively monitoring your Twitter account.
Additional ways you can use automation to better manage your Twitter account:
• Respond back with links if certain keywords or phrases are used such as “documentation” or “can you help me”. • Alert staff if negative tweets are seen such as tweets including your corporate account and the word “fail” • Automatically trigger a simple “thank you” direct message to new followers.
• Auto-follow users based on key words.
• Pre-schedule important tweets, such as a link to company news or a product announcement, just like you would schedule an outbound email or voice message.
2.
MONITOR YOUR BRAND
Monitor Twitter’s public timeline for all mentions of your brand.
Identify and engage raving customers (“Companyname service rocks” or “Amazing stay at xyz hotel.”)
Trigger alerts to staff for detractors (“Companyname leaks customer data. #FAIL”).
Broad brand monitoring also help companies understand who is retweeting their news or posts to identify and engage industry influencers.
Again, companies can use application logic to look for keywords, keyword combinations, question marks, and emoticons in order to help determine context and sentiment — and either auto reply or flag specific tweets for human interaction.
3.
ENABLE SELF-SERVICE
Companies can set up an account specifically for offering customer self-service — from basic information such as a location finder app to FAQs to support ticket updates. Customers enter one or more key words to receive answers or links to more information. Just like in a directed dialogue IVR (Interactive Voice Response) scenario, companies may offer example keywords to guide customers in using their self-service application (like menu choices).
4.
DELIVER PROACTIVE CUSTOMER SERVICE
More than ever, today’s customer expects fast, convenient access to information and support. Many times that means turning to social networking sites for answers when they have a problem with your product or service. A social CRM strategy can help enhance the customer experience as well as quickly defuse potentially damaging situations.
For example, an application can monitor the Twitter public timeline and when a tweet is seen like this:
@customer: 3pm work deadline. Bad day for (Provider) service to be down.
The application can auto respond with:
@customer sorry for the inconvenience. We’re close to solving the problem. Get estimated repair times at (link).
Or respond with:
@customer We aren’t experiencing any outages at the moment. DM us your number or click here to call us and we’ll help sort out the issue.
Notice that the above tweet incorporates the use of additional communications channels — notably click to call in which an Interactive Voice Response system gathers customer account information and priority routes the customer to an agent for assistance.
Regardless of the type of company, complaints, problems and questions are an opportunity to engage the customer and provide great support. In some cases, a company can effectively use auto replies. In other cases, key words help social media managers and support teams identify priority tweets that need attention and respond accordingly. Of course, proactive customer service strategies are equally effective when responding to a positive tweet.
For example:
@customer: Checking in at (hotel) Miami Beach! Need restaurant recommendations!
Could be auto responded to with:
Welcome @customer!
Stop by the concierge desk and we’ll hook you up with reservations.
The key point is that you can you use monitoring of the
Twitter public timeline as a way to proactively engage
with customers to create positive experiences, resolve
issues and build stronger loyalty.
5.
RESPONDING TO SALES OPPORTUNITIES
Use automation to monitor for key words, key word combinations and phrases that indicate a prospective buyer. For example, an electronics dealer may monitor for terms such as “camera” or “HD TV” combined with terms such as “buy,” “price,” “recommend,” “best,” etc. It’s also important to include additional trigger words and punctuation, as well as negative key words that help ensure automated responses are highly relevant. There is a big difference between “Can anyone recommend a good digital camera for the money?” and “I don’t recommend the xyz digital camera. Complete waste of money!” A well-designed application will help you avoid embarrassing auto responses.
Voxeo’s insurance bot demonstrates how automation can be used to identify and respond to a potential sales lead. See the on-demand video demo at:
http://bit.ly/socialcrmdemo
Note that this type of outbound engagement may not be for all companies and must be done carefully so as to not feel too much like “spam” to the person receiving it. You need to decide the level of comfort you have with this level of engagement.COMPREHENSIVE ANALYTICS
No matter what level of automation you choose, it is important that your solution provides solid analytics to help you truly understand if your automated applications are indeed helping you. You need to have a rich set of reports showing engagement levels, completion rates, etc. — and providing that information across all your communication channels, not solely the social channels. Ideally your solution will also enable your analytics to be brought into your existing business intelligence system so that they may be viewed in your current dashboards and other reports.
AUTOMATION AS A COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE
Ultimately you goal is to get your customer (or potential customer) the information they need as fast as possible. Applied wisely, automation can help you scale your support of Twitter and other social channels and rapidly collect and distribute information in those channels. Using appropriate automation, you can reply faster than your competitors and build the positive customer experience that drives high levels of loyalty and creates passionate advocates for your products and services. Look for a provider who can help you achieve all this and add social channels to ways in which you successfully interact with your customers.
