Does your company sell a set of products or services that you find customers have more questions about than other products & services that you offer? Sometimes certain products and services require a bit more explanation. At the point of sale, a customer may not know enough to ask specific questions (you don’t know what you don’t know, right?). After the sale occurs, your customer begins using the product or service and BOOM, he runs into a situation whereby he needs to ask someone a question.
If these situations occur on a fairly regular basis at your company, I’m sure you’re either getting a phone call from your customer or he’s going to be stopping back into the store to talk with someone. Wouldn’t it be great if you (or an employee who you delegate) could answer all product and service related questions at one time each day, instead of being interrupted throughout the day from each customer who has a question? For those of you who are shaking your heads YES, then Twitter might be your answer.
I know there are people out there who still don’t believe in Twitter for business, but I certainly know how great it works for Catalyst Marketers and our clients. We love Twitter here at Catalyst Marketers. There are so many opportunities that Twitter creates for small (and large) businesses. We have written about Twitter on this blog before, so if you’re a Catalyst Marketers blog subscriber, then you’ve heard all of this before. If you’re still on the fence about using Twitter for business, then do some research, ask other business owners who you know are using Twitter, and you may even want to check out these posts from us, Dell Does Twitter, Do You?, or Is Gmail Down? I’ll Twitter it. For those of you who have been using Twitter for business, now you may have a new use for the micro-blogging tool, answering customer product & service-related questions.
Now, I know some of you may say, “well, I’ve been using Twitter for Customer Service already”. If so, that’s great. You rock! With that said, you still may find some value in this post, so stay with me.
To successfully roll out this program, begin advertising it within the store, say through printing small signs or including a message on your store bags. The message may simply read, “Tweet us @Your_Company with any questions”. You can then reinforce this message during the point-of-sale. Be sure to educate your employees on this new way of providing customer service. Answer any questions they may have and arm them with answers to possible questions that customers may have (ie. Do I need a Twitter account to tweet with you?). This way, when customers are paying for a product or service that your employees know prompts a lot of customer questions, he/she can explain to your customer that if when she gets home, she has any questions at all, that she can log onto Twitter and tweet @Your_Company her question. Inform your customer that someone will respond to the tweet within 24 – 36 hours.
There are multiple advantages to handling customer questions through Twitter:
- By explaining to customers how they can best get their questions answered, you’ve alleviated any anxiety
- Having customers tweet their questions allows you or your employees to log into your company Twitter account and respond to questions all at once, instead of throughout the day
- In your response, you may want to include a custom hashtag like #CompanyName_CustomerQuestions or something like that. This way people can follow your hashtag and review questions and answers from previous customers. This may save them from having to ask the same question that’s already been answered.
Here at Catalyst Marketers, we love Twitter for business. We think it’s a fantastic online social tool. Hopefully you find the value in Twitter for business as well. Twitter for Customer Service is one of the many ways to leverage the tool. Feel free to contact us if you have any questions about using Twitter for business.
Do you remember using that Emergency Call List when your business was going to have to stay closed on a normal working day? You know, with each new employee you bring on, and for every old employee who leaves, you update that list, print it out, and make sure everyone knows the procedure. Usually it starts at the top with the owner or manager deciding if their store will open on a day where weather or other emergency factors come into play. Once the decision is made, the owner calls the next person in line, then that person is in charge of calling the next person, and so on. 
Before the advent of using online social tools for business, there was really no way of communicating to customers that a store would be closed for the day. Granted, on days like the Philadelphia area had on Saturday, many people aren’t going out shopping in the first place. With that said, what if you’re a doctor’s office or another type of business where customers have an appointment setup on a day that’s in question? Well, you’d have to pay someone to answer the phone and unless you have a redirect system in place, that individual would probably have to go into the office. Obviously, that’s dangerous during bad weather days. Now, all of that has changed due to more and more businesses using online social tools to communicate with customers. A big key to this is also the comfort which customers have in using those same tools to communicate with businesses. 
