netrashetty

Netra Shetty
Twitter is a website, owned and operated by Twitter Inc., which offers a social networking and microblogging service, enabling its users to send and read messages called tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the user's profile page.

The website is based in San Francisco, California. Twitter also has servers and offices in San Antonio, Texas; and Boston, Massachusetts. Twitter, Inc. was originally incorporated in California, but as of 2007 is incorporated in the jurisdiction of Delaware.[7]

Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched in July. Since then Twitter has gained popularity worldwide and is estimated to have 200 million users, generating 65 million tweets a day and handling over 800,000 search queries per day.[8] It is sometimes described as the "SMS of the Internet".[9]

Twitter can transform customer relations for the better can be substantial for reducing costs and improving brand image.
Step 1. Understand why Twitter is an ideal customer service platform

Before calling the company executives into a meeting and telling them we must use Twitter, you need to understand just why Twitter and customer service is a match made in heaven. Let’s think about some of the major tenants of good customer service and how they relate to Twitter:

Problem resolution: The main goal of customer service is to help someone resolve their issues. While phone conversations can help solve problems, wait times do not. Twitter is a lightning-fast platform that can help sift through and solve problems quickly. If it’s a small issue, a single tweet may be enough. For a more complex problem, the brand can initiate a deeper conversation with the customer.

Positive brand image: Great customer service gets talked about, and this can lead to more sales and more attention. Twitter is one of the most viral platforms around, which can make one happy customer into an international story.

Staff involvement: If the team does not buy into the notion of helping the customer, they are going to provide sub-par assistance. Twitter is not only a more interesting platform than phone or email, but gives staff a better picture of their impact on others.

Cost reduction: Customer service via Twitter often takes less time and a lot less money than a dedicated call center. With Twitter, it’s necessary to be short and to the point, which reduces the time needed to solve each problem.

Step 2. Track the ENTIRE conversation around your brand


Monitter Image

Once you understand how Twitter can play a role in customer service, the next step should center around conversation tracking. What are people already saying about your brand? Have people misinterpreted your message? What about the good things they say about your new feature? Track ALL the possible keywords that are related to your brand, like the names of your key features or any nickname your company may have. Here are two tools we recommend:

Monitter: Monitter makes it simple to track multiple keywords on one page using columns. Create a new column for each new keyword or keyword variation you want to track. Monitter will update in real-time whenever those words are mentioned on Twitter.

Tweetbeep: If your brand isn’t getting dozens of mentions per hour, or if you want to be sure you’re catching everything, Tweetbeep will check Twitter for you and send you emails with all of the mentions of your brand, as well as links so you can easily save tweets or write a response.

Step 3. Make customers aware of your presence

Watching a conversation gives you a good idea of your brand’s reputation and standing in social media and elsewhere, but it’s a passive approach. Great customer service is active. To get started, make your Twitter presence known. Ask users to follow you on Twitter, prominently place a button on your website, and advertise that you’re trying to engage with your customers in problem resolution via social media. Customer service on Twitter won’t work if nobody knows where to find you.
Step 4. Respond quickly and transparently


Comcast Cares Image

The key to great customer service is the speed and quality of your response. When you find someone complaining about an issue, @reply them asking if you can help. Don’t take an arrogant tone and don’t tell them they screwed up. Ask them if they’d like you to intervene and provide them the information they need.

If a problem is sensitive, the customer is extraordinarily upset, or you want to get in contact with a customer fast, either try to direct message them or give them a fast way to contact you, like a special email address or even a personal phone number. Let them know you’re there to help and go with them step-by-step.

@replies work best because there are no restrictions on who you can reply to and it provides a public and transparent face to your customer service. Others can see what you’re doing, which can help reassure customers or even solve problems they were going to ask you about, saving you additional time.
Step 5. Be engaged in the conversations

Twitter is a conversational platform, and people like to talk to people, so take time to chat as well. Twitter is an opportunity to build an image and identity for the brand, so talking with customers about why you like the brand so much, what cool things the company has done, or retweeting a success story gives people many reasons to follow what you say.

So remember, even if you’re using a software like Salesforce’s Service Cloud to manage Twitter customer service, it needs to be supplemented with personal conversations.
Step 6. Be authentic


Starbucks Twitter Image

Most of all, when you’re conducting customer service and customer relationship management, you need to be forthcoming. It’s easier than ever for your customers to research whether or not you’re telling the truth. And if you aren’t, they will punish you by mobilizing and making their anger heard. I can give you plenty of examples where this was the case.

Despite this warning, the benefits to your brand and your customers by using Twitter as a customer service platform are immense. Comcast, Dell, Southwest Airlines, Ford, Starbucks, and many more have been successful in promoting a positive brand image and solving customer problems with less cost than phone or email service. Twitter and social media are helping redefine how customer service is done.


These are just a few of the recent Twitter insights, just Google it and you will find dozens more.

To further the “Twit-olution”, we wanted to provide a bit more of a deep dive into key Twitter strategies that companies can take on to meet business and communication goals, keeping in mind do’s and don’ts of Twitter throughout.

Over the next few weeks, we will be providing you with a look into a variety of specific Twitter strategies for:

* Customer Relations
* Crisis Management
* Corporate Reputation Management
* Event Coverage
* Issues Advocacy
* Product Promotion and Sales
* Internal Communication

In all of these strategies, you are going to see three key steps: follow, create and engage. These are really the three main steps to Twitter of which we have expanded upon to provide detailed recommendations specific to each strategy.

First up, the much discussed, often necessary customer relations strategy.

A CNN report highlights the urgent need for businesses to invest in new modes of customer communication and to tailor their approaches to match customer preferences with specific mention of social media and the use of new conversation platforms, like Twitter.

A customer relations strategy on Twitter is essential for consumer marketers whose products and services can and are already being talked about. There are a lot of great insights out there already around this strategy. So let’s take a second to really break down the key steps in setting up and maintaining a strong customer relations handle on Twitter.

As with any of these strategies, before kicking things off, make sure you develop a complete strategy (see below for more details on customer relations).

* Establish a Twitter handle and profile that sets the expectation for your followers. Be clear in the handle bio and description as to what you will be focusing on and who you represent.
* The name of the company should be included in at least your bio, and ideally your handle (this will help people find your brand) as well.
* Disclose whether the handle will be maintained by one individual or a team of people within the company.
* Define the roles and responsibilities internally amongst your team members (including how frequently your Tweets should be updated, who should and should not be followed/responded to, and how you should respond in various situations).

Once you have determined your Twitter handle and internal responsibilities, here are the key steps in developing a audience and maintaining an active conversation with your customers:

1. FOLLOW
Find out what people are saying about your brand through Twitter search functions like, Search.Twitter (f.k.a Summize) and TweetScan. Search.Twitter is a bit more in-depth and allows you to complete an advanced search around key phrases, within specific dates, and from specific handles.

To make it easy, set up an RSS feed for your Twitter searches, so that you can easily check in to see new conversations around the brand.

Get familiar with these conversations and start to follow key contributors, customers and brand “lusters” (coined by Virginia, as those who are interested in your brand but not yet customers).

This is also where an organization tool like TweetDeck can come in handy to help you categorize those you are following.

2. CREATE
All Twitter handles should have a clear personality - even for customer service. Keep in mind the overall personality of your brand as you tweet and make sure you are providing valuable information to your followers.

As you identify conversations and start to follow your customers, you will be able to get an idea of what they are looking for. What do they want to know? Are they asking for product information? Looking for tips on using a service or fixing a product? This should be the guideline for your content.

With the 140-character limit, use tinyurl or snurl to direct followers to relevant information and useful resources outside of Twitter. (Snurl lets you pick your OWN shortcode, which means you can track only those links that originate with YOU)

3. ENGAGE
While you can be providing general information to your followers on a regular basis, you also want to make sure your customers know they are being heard.

Focus on replying to individuals who have questions about your brand, who are sharing their brand experiences and to those to whom you can provide helpful information and resources.

Direct Messages are also useful for corresponding privately with others. Go ahead and send new followers a direct message thanking them for their interest and providing any additional information or resources that could be useful.

GREAT EXAMPLES
A lot of companies are establishing their brand on Twitter and starting to dabble in customer responses - @JetBlue, @Zappos, and of course @comcastcares. Check them out as well as a few more in this recent Business Week presentation.

Frank Eliason at Comcast started @comcastcares in April 2008 in response to the customer conversations he and his team found on Twitter through monitoring. offers customers specific troubleshooting tips, online resources, new product info and a key customer relations personality (e.g. Frank’s).

One of Microsoft’s public relations and customer service strategies in recent times seems to center around the popular messaging service Twitter. Microsoft did include Twitter in the Windows 7 promotion and there are other official Microsoft services and divisions on Twitter that make use of this new way of communicating. One of the latest divisions to join ranks of the Microsoft cohorts at Twitter is the Microsoft Customer Service which have established their own support channel at MicrosoftHelps.

This gives Windows 7 users another option of contacting the Microsoft Customer Service division. How does it work? A new support request or question can be directed at the Microsoft Support team by sending a message to their official Twitter message.

microsoft customer service

The limitations of Twitter make this a less than ideal method of contacting support for questions that require in depth explanation. It can however be a quick and efficient way to get a response for basic or short questions. Questions that have already been answered include hardware problems (network adapter or video card not working), other errors users encountered in the operating system or software related questions.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Twitter is a website, owned and operated by Twitter Inc., which offers a social networking and microblogging service, enabling its users to send and read messages called tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the user's profile page.

The website is based in San Francisco, California. Twitter also has servers and offices in San Antonio, Texas; and Boston, Massachusetts. Twitter, Inc. was originally incorporated in California, but as of 2007 is incorporated in the jurisdiction of Delaware.[7]

Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched in July. Since then Twitter has gained popularity worldwide and is estimated to have 200 million users, generating 65 million tweets a day and handling over 800,000 search queries per day.[8] It is sometimes described as the "SMS of the Internet".[9]

Twitter can transform customer relations for the better can be substantial for reducing costs and improving brand image.
Step 1. Understand why Twitter is an ideal customer service platform

Before calling the company executives into a meeting and telling them we must use Twitter, you need to understand just why Twitter and customer service is a match made in heaven. Let’s think about some of the major tenants of good customer service and how they relate to Twitter:

Problem resolution: The main goal of customer service is to help someone resolve their issues. While phone conversations can help solve problems, wait times do not. Twitter is a lightning-fast platform that can help sift through and solve problems quickly. If it’s a small issue, a single tweet may be enough. For a more complex problem, the brand can initiate a deeper conversation with the customer.

Positive brand image: Great customer service gets talked about, and this can lead to more sales and more attention. Twitter is one of the most viral platforms around, which can make one happy customer into an international story.

Staff involvement: If the team does not buy into the notion of helping the customer, they are going to provide sub-par assistance. Twitter is not only a more interesting platform than phone or email, but gives staff a better picture of their impact on others.

Cost reduction: Customer service via Twitter often takes less time and a lot less money than a dedicated call center. With Twitter, it’s necessary to be short and to the point, which reduces the time needed to solve each problem.

Step 2. Track the ENTIRE conversation around your brand


Monitter Image

Once you understand how Twitter can play a role in customer service, the next step should center around conversation tracking. What are people already saying about your brand? Have people misinterpreted your message? What about the good things they say about your new feature? Track ALL the possible keywords that are related to your brand, like the names of your key features or any nickname your company may have. Here are two tools we recommend:

Monitter: Monitter makes it simple to track multiple keywords on one page using columns. Create a new column for each new keyword or keyword variation you want to track. Monitter will update in real-time whenever those words are mentioned on Twitter.

Tweetbeep: If your brand isn’t getting dozens of mentions per hour, or if you want to be sure you’re catching everything, Tweetbeep will check Twitter for you and send you emails with all of the mentions of your brand, as well as links so you can easily save tweets or write a response.

Step 3. Make customers aware of your presence

Watching a conversation gives you a good idea of your brand’s reputation and standing in social media and elsewhere, but it’s a passive approach. Great customer service is active. To get started, make your Twitter presence known. Ask users to follow you on Twitter, prominently place a button on your website, and advertise that you’re trying to engage with your customers in problem resolution via social media. Customer service on Twitter won’t work if nobody knows where to find you.
Step 4. Respond quickly and transparently


Comcast Cares Image

The key to great customer service is the speed and quality of your response. When you find someone complaining about an issue, @reply them asking if you can help. Don’t take an arrogant tone and don’t tell them they screwed up. Ask them if they’d like you to intervene and provide them the information they need.

If a problem is sensitive, the customer is extraordinarily upset, or you want to get in contact with a customer fast, either try to direct message them or give them a fast way to contact you, like a special email address or even a personal phone number. Let them know you’re there to help and go with them step-by-step.

@replies work best because there are no restrictions on who you can reply to and it provides a public and transparent face to your customer service. Others can see what you’re doing, which can help reassure customers or even solve problems they were going to ask you about, saving you additional time.
Step 5. Be engaged in the conversations

Twitter is a conversational platform, and people like to talk to people, so take time to chat as well. Twitter is an opportunity to build an image and identity for the brand, so talking with customers about why you like the brand so much, what cool things the company has done, or retweeting a success story gives people many reasons to follow what you say.

So remember, even if you’re using a software like Salesforce’s Service Cloud to manage Twitter customer service, it needs to be supplemented with personal conversations.
Step 6. Be authentic


Starbucks Twitter Image

Most of all, when you’re conducting customer service and customer relationship management, you need to be forthcoming. It’s easier than ever for your customers to research whether or not you’re telling the truth. And if you aren’t, they will punish you by mobilizing and making their anger heard. I can give you plenty of examples where this was the case.

Despite this warning, the benefits to your brand and your customers by using Twitter as a customer service platform are immense. Comcast, Dell, Southwest Airlines, Ford, Starbucks, and many more have been successful in promoting a positive brand image and solving customer problems with less cost than phone or email service. Twitter and social media are helping redefine how customer service is done.


These are just a few of the recent Twitter insights, just Google it and you will find dozens more.

To further the “Twit-olution”, we wanted to provide a bit more of a deep dive into key Twitter strategies that companies can take on to meet business and communication goals, keeping in mind do’s and don’ts of Twitter throughout.

Over the next few weeks, we will be providing you with a look into a variety of specific Twitter strategies for:

* Customer Relations
* Crisis Management
* Corporate Reputation Management
* Event Coverage
* Issues Advocacy
* Product Promotion and Sales
* Internal Communication

In all of these strategies, you are going to see three key steps: follow, create and engage. These are really the three main steps to Twitter of which we have expanded upon to provide detailed recommendations specific to each strategy.

First up, the much discussed, often necessary customer relations strategy.

A CNN report highlights the urgent need for businesses to invest in new modes of customer communication and to tailor their approaches to match customer preferences with specific mention of social media and the use of new conversation platforms, like Twitter.

A customer relations strategy on Twitter is essential for consumer marketers whose products and services can and are already being talked about. There are a lot of great insights out there already around this strategy. So let’s take a second to really break down the key steps in setting up and maintaining a strong customer relations handle on Twitter.

As with any of these strategies, before kicking things off, make sure you develop a complete strategy (see below for more details on customer relations).

* Establish a Twitter handle and profile that sets the expectation for your followers. Be clear in the handle bio and description as to what you will be focusing on and who you represent.
* The name of the company should be included in at least your bio, and ideally your handle (this will help people find your brand) as well.
* Disclose whether the handle will be maintained by one individual or a team of people within the company.
* Define the roles and responsibilities internally amongst your team members (including how frequently your Tweets should be updated, who should and should not be followed/responded to, and how you should respond in various situations).

Once you have determined your Twitter handle and internal responsibilities, here are the key steps in developing a audience and maintaining an active conversation with your customers:

1. FOLLOW
Find out what people are saying about your brand through Twitter search functions like, Search.Twitter (f.k.a Summize) and TweetScan. Search.Twitter is a bit more in-depth and allows you to complete an advanced search around key phrases, within specific dates, and from specific handles.

To make it easy, set up an RSS feed for your Twitter searches, so that you can easily check in to see new conversations around the brand.

Get familiar with these conversations and start to follow key contributors, customers and brand “lusters” (coined by Virginia, as those who are interested in your brand but not yet customers).

This is also where an organization tool like TweetDeck can come in handy to help you categorize those you are following.

2. CREATE
All Twitter handles should have a clear personality - even for customer service. Keep in mind the overall personality of your brand as you tweet and make sure you are providing valuable information to your followers.

As you identify conversations and start to follow your customers, you will be able to get an idea of what they are looking for. What do they want to know? Are they asking for product information? Looking for tips on using a service or fixing a product? This should be the guideline for your content.

With the 140-character limit, use tinyurl or snurl to direct followers to relevant information and useful resources outside of Twitter. (Snurl lets you pick your OWN shortcode, which means you can track only those links that originate with YOU)

3. ENGAGE
While you can be providing general information to your followers on a regular basis, you also want to make sure your customers know they are being heard.

Focus on replying to individuals who have questions about your brand, who are sharing their brand experiences and to those to whom you can provide helpful information and resources.

Direct Messages are also useful for corresponding privately with others. Go ahead and send new followers a direct message thanking them for their interest and providing any additional information or resources that could be useful.

GREAT EXAMPLES
A lot of companies are establishing their brand on Twitter and starting to dabble in customer responses - @JetBlue, @Zappos, and of course @comcastcares. Check them out as well as a few more in this recent Business Week presentation.

Frank Eliason at Comcast started @comcastcares in April 2008 in response to the customer conversations he and his team found on Twitter through monitoring. offers customers specific troubleshooting tips, online resources, new product info and a key customer relations personality (e.g. Frank’s).

One of Microsoft’s public relations and customer service strategies in recent times seems to center around the popular messaging service Twitter. Microsoft did include Twitter in the Windows 7 promotion and there are other official Microsoft services and divisions on Twitter that make use of this new way of communicating. One of the latest divisions to join ranks of the Microsoft cohorts at Twitter is the Microsoft Customer Service which have established their own support channel at MicrosoftHelps.

This gives Windows 7 users another option of contacting the Microsoft Customer Service division. How does it work? A new support request or question can be directed at the Microsoft Support team by sending a message to their official Twitter message.

microsoft customer service

The limitations of Twitter make this a less than ideal method of contacting support for questions that require in depth explanation. It can however be a quick and efficient way to get a response for basic or short questions. Questions that have already been answered include hardware problems (network adapter or video card not working), other errors users encountered in the operating system or software related questions.

Hey netra, i would like to tell you that you are doing very nice work and i really appreciate it. Well, i have also got some important information on Twitter and would like to share it with you which would help many people here.
 

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