Twitter and social media - Marketing or customer service?

Submitted by Claire Rollinson on Fri, 15/01/2010 - 12:19

Claire Rollinson

15th January 2010

Claire Rollinson, Enterprise manager of NCVO, 50px portrait 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

Comments

Submitted by Chalky White on Fri, 15/01/2010 - 13:28.

Think this is a little unfair, although understand that when applied to the private sector, expectation is different, especially from the larger organisations.

As a small organisation (2.5 full time equivalent staff) our use of twitter is primarily to find information, rather than provide information. We should accept that different people have different reasons to use the various types of social media out there, rather than trying to impose our standards and expectancy on them.

Whilst it would be reasonable to expect an email reply from any organisation, whether private, public or third sector, it does seem a bit unreasonable (at least to me) to expect an instant - or even very quick - response 24 hours per day to twitter.

Where there MAY be an expectancy of this is if any organisation publishes a statement of standards that explicitly provides that level of service. Any organisation that does this would be opening themselves up to criticism of this type and it would be extremely unwise to do so.

Even M&S, who - in my view - have never understood customer service, they have understood market segmentation and arranged their entire operation to one part of the market.

Quite right too, even if I will never be part of their market.

Submitted by Claire Rollinson on Fri, 15/01/2010 - 13:41.

Many thanks for your post Chalky - and yes small organisations with limited time and staff resources won't be able to have the presence on twitter, larger organisations are able to have.

My point wasn't that a quick response was the necessity, more that a response is sent at all.

I'm sure if a number of your supporters were either advocating you or asking you questions on twitter you wouldn't ignore them completely? Yet this seems to be the policy for many organisations. If you are tweeting out marketing messages all day, but then are not prepared to spend that time talking to customers, i think it sends out all the wrong messages - that you don't care about your customers? We should be engaging with people who take the time out to speak to us.

You raise an important point - it is all about setting out expectations from the outset so your twitter followers or supporters know what to expect.

Submitted by Damien Austin-Walker on Fri, 15/01/2010 - 16:43.

Claire - I think you have summised Wednesday's Media140 meetup very well.

I certainly think that with social media as a whole that empowering individual staff to take responsibility for some if not all of the communications relevant to their role can be beneficial and can certainly lend authenticity to any conversations or engagement. If it's coming from the people closest to the relevant (to that particular conversation or content) part of the organizaton then it is a good thing. However it needs to be ensured that staff are comfortable with this, clued up and supported.

In my organization of 30-40 people I think that is is possibly easier to find that balance between marketing, PR, web team, customer care and/or volunteer support and to empower staff to look after the areas they are comfortable with and to communicate and pass on to other staff when appropriate. I can understand as in Chalky's point that a very small organization may not have these resources and also at the other extreme - in a large commercial corporation, they may not necessarily feel need to answer ALL mentions. In the case of a small organization as long as expectations are managed beforehand that's fine.

If you didn't have the resources to answer your telephone line it would be bad form not to put up voicemail message of some kind.

For a large organization I certainly don't think ALL mentions necessarily need to be acknowledged (though it is nice to acknowledge as many as you can) BUT I do feel that all those that are direct questions and such should get a response, unless of course it is simply not physically feasible in which case expectation management comes in with a notice of some kind explaining the way and routes that you are able to take enquiries or feedback. Of course you need to align this with your overall objectives and goals - and just maybe for some very large organizations ignoring the community may not significantly affect these goals. Not sure that can remain the case forever though...