Five reasons customer service is better on social media.

The other day, I was playing around with TripWolf, a cool new social network for travel lovers. I was a bit puzzled to see that my own town of Birmingham, Ala., was illustrated with a user's photos of a river in Pittsburgh.

I mentioned it on Twitter and then promptly forgot about it. So I was surprised this weekend to get a message from TripWolf CEO Sebastian Heinzel, who vowed to fix the Birmingham photos.

While small, this is a great example of how social media can be a customer-service gold mine for businesses that are willing to use it. In fact, I'm willing to say customer service is the single most effective way any company can use social tools on the Internet.

Here's why:

1. Because, for the first time ever, you can stop fires before they start.

2. It's easy.

3. It's flattering.

4. It's a better use of your money than PR or advertising.

5. A little goes a long way.

Click on any one to learn more, or just read them all after the jump.

Related post:  Five myths of social media.

1. Because, for the first time ever, you can stop fires before they start.

Until recent years, businesses have never been able to eavesdrop on conversations about their products. So they basically divided their effort into two fields: public relations (to push a positive message to the masses) and customer service (to deal with incoming complaints).

Today, those two jobs are merging, thanks to social media. Now you can find out almost instantly when people talk about your business online. You can move quickly to thank those who praise you and help those who pan you.

Most companies today are scared to death of this prospect and say things like, "We don't respond to bloggers." That's fine, as long as you're not into making money and expanding your business.

2. It's easy.

I have a personal theory about who should be rounded up and flogged. It's a short list. It just includes any advertising account manager, PR professional or marketing exec who doesn't have a Google Alert set up for his or her client/employer.

Google Alerts are fantastically powerful and easy to use. You can set up as many as you'd like, and you'll get e-mail notifications when those terms are mentioned online. It's not perfect, but it's about as close as you can get. I use it for everything from this blog's name (and mine, for that matter) to the names of marketing campaigns we launched more than a year ago.

Another vital tool is Summize, a search engine that tracks the countless conversations on Twitter. You can easily search for your company's name, your name, etc., and results will be almost up to the second. It's such a valuable site, in fact, Twitter is expected to purchase it.

As you can see in this exhaustive wrapup, more than a few companies are catching on to the customer-service potential of Twitter and Summize.

3. It's flattering.

There's just something surprising, disarming and empowering about having a business respond to your opinions online, especially when unsolicited. It strokes the ego and actually makes you feel like all this rambling might actually be worth it.

Even when someone seems to be seething with bile, you'll be surprised how quickly the tone can change when you respond quickly, politely and earnestly.

4. It's a better use of your money than PR or advertising.

I say this as a guy who writes advertising for a living, but it's true. Social media is rarely an ideal place for intensive advertising. Ditto for PR, which is often just as annoying for online writers as it is for traditional journalists.

Good customer service through social media can accomplish the goals of advertising and PR, anyway. And it does it in a personal, one-on-one manner that can still translate into big-picture success.

I'm not saying advertising and PR don't have their place in social media. They definitely do, but I'm willing to say that in the long run, they are tremendously less effective than consistent, proactive customer service.

5. A little goes a long way

It can be daunting to imagine having to do customer service as one-on-one outreach. And I'm not saying traditional customer service should be dismantled.

However, taking the time to contact a frustrated customer online can have results immeasurably greater than any call center or tech-support forum.

Why? Because it's all about expectation.

When I contact customer service, I expect customer service. In the few instances when that's what I actually get, I'm not amazed. It's what I expected. (OK, so I probably expected to waste my time and get nowhere, so tepid service is still the cream of the crop.)

But when a business contacts me first, my expectations are already surpassed. I'm surprised, I'm flattered, and I'm likely to tell my friends about it — like I'm doing now.

Happy customers, healthy buzz and better brand loyalty. It can be yours, just by showing that you're paying attention.

Comments

[Meg]

I think everyone uses the example of @comcastcares and the whole slew of @zappos employees on Twitter to talk about how customer service flows nicely into the style of conversation, interaction and word-of-mouth spread of information that occurs there, but I see it as a real boon for small companies and entrepreneurs as well.

You get instant feedback on your product, the conversations about your product are largely transparent, and everything you do right is on the public record without you issuing a press release or blog post to point it out.

And I love the accountability angle, too -- just as quickly as good news spreads, bad news can hit all four corners of the Twitterverse. That means you do it right the first time, you follow up, and you put energy into solving problems right away -- or face the wrath of many PR-crushing @'s.

More businesses need to start out with that level of intentionality as a foundation.

[Mark Tosczak]

Great post, David. Not only do you demonstrate how to improve customer service, but also how social media can be integrated more broadly into an organization, beyond just the marketing and public relations silos.

I would quibble a little, though, with your use of the term PR. Formal definitions of public relations usually include something like "communicating with an organization's various publics," and that includes two-way communications, and it can certainly mean one-on-one communications through social media about customer service issues. It's more than just pitching stories to the news media (or pitching stories to bloggers).

The challenge here for organizations is to spread some of the practices that have traditionally been stuck in the marketing communications functions to everybody in the organization.

[Irene Alvarez]

Mercy saints, this just happened to me! I am now quite impressed with Firefox, who responded to one of my tweets about browser trouble. The tweequence of events is here if you're curious: http://twitter.com/HappyInk_Rini/favourites