On Tuesday night I attended a lively media140 event where people from agencies, commercial companies and a few brave souls from the voluntary sector met up to discuss the role of twitter and social networking in our organisations today.(b33god and NCVOforesight thank you for keeping me company in person and on the live twitter feed)
What I found most interesting was a topic on what social media should be used for. RichardBaker who use to work for Virgin Trains highlighted how twitter is great for customer service, allowing you to respond and engage with your customers or supporters instantly, including out of hours. They have an issue or query, and as long as you have the right monitoring tools set up and are actually willing to engage, you can respond very quickly. Answering or alleviating any concerns, queries or complaints.
Interestingly a few people made the point that we shouldn't be disappointed if an organisation doesn't reply to the consumer on twitter, even if we expect it.
This is not something I agree with - with some of my fellow tweeters @Rachel Beer and @lowcarbondiary nodding along with me too. Rachel Beer tweeting "Damn right! I had a useless experience with Marks and Spencer who tweeted about my complaint, then sent *awful**email*." Going on to say "All brands are going to have to deliver 'out of office hours' engagement"
I believe that if your organisation or brand is on twitter then you have set out the expectation that you want to engage with your customers, and not just when being replied to directly.
We should be actively monitoring and listening to our customers, keeping abreast of the conversations to ensure we ARE not only meeting expectations but surpassing them. Isn't that always been the mantra in customer service? - is this the conflict between marketing people of old and the traditional customer service roles.
It use to be that us in marketing would craft up a lovely creative campaign, send it out, then wait for the responses to come rolling in. Often however it is the customer service, admin or operations team who ACTUALLY deal with and speak to customers.
Did our offer we promised in our marketing communications meet the actual reality experienced by our customers? Is IT easy to donate or buy online? Did we deliver our service or product on time?
Now marketers need to be a lot closer to the customers and prospects they communicate with. No longer can we just push messages out for 'other' people in our organisation to respond too.
So if your twitter feed is handled by your marketing, PR or web team - lets make sure we empower them to be our personal voice of the organisation, and to be our customer service arm on twitter.
Your customers and supporters expect it - you wouldn't ignore (I hope) emails and telephone calls sent by your customers - neither should this be the case in the social networks.
What do you think?
ps join me on twitter at http://twitter.com/ClaireRollo
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