The 10 commandments for running customer service on Twitter

Twitter has provided a platform for brands and customers to communicate more easily than

ever before. It’s a fantastic opportunity to provide real-time customer service. But it also brings the potential for a fantastic, and public, fail. Follow these 10 commandments to make

sure you end up on the winning side in the Twitter customer service revolution.

1. Thou shalt be on Twitter• The old saying goes: if you’re not talking about your

brand on Twitter everyone else will be. First things first – if you haven’t already, get yourself a presence on Twitter.

• If you don’t, then expect to be bad-mouthed behind your back. Modern customers absolutely expect to find someone to complain to on Twitter and many won’t look further when they don’t find you there. They’ll just stir up trouble.

2. Thou shalt not go silent• If you are on Twitter, make sure you’re actually monitoring it. Leaving complaints

unanswered will only frustrate people more. You may feel like you have better things to do but fairly soon you’ll have a Twitter “storm” on your hands.

• Disgruntled customers tend to pour their anger into their keyboards in frustration. But in fact they often turn quite pleasant when they receive a polite and helpful response.

• Whatever you do don’t tweet about your latest ad while people are struggling to access your malfunctioning service. Buffer is a terrific tool but it can cause people to think you’re ignoring their cries for help if something goes wrong and you’re not actually online but appear to be posting.

• If you’re the type of brand that needs to deal with customer service on a regular basis you should consider having a designated account for such things.

• It will allow you to deal with problems more efficiently and give customers a clear place to direct their queries. It also means your community management team can focus on their specific areas of expertise.

3. Thou shalt have a separate account

• Most importantly it means your branding account won’t be cluttered up with the day to day dealing with complaints.

4. Thou shalt make it personal

• A very effective way to add a personal touch to your customer service is to add the name of the individual dealing with an issue to their tweets.

• This is standard procedure for call centres so why not Twitter? It allows the complainant to feel that they are dealing with a human being. It also helps them understand when there has been a change in shift so the new administrator may not be aware of a problem they’ve been discussing over time.

5. Thou shalt get the tone right

• Responding to people in a polite, charming and helpful way is no mean feat, especially when you only have 140 characters to play with.

• But it is vitally important that you are able to find the right tone when dealing with customer service on Twitter. The best tend to keep things short and sweet. Give them the information they need to solve their problem, don’t waffle on with excuses.

• Be light and cheerful, to dispel bad feelings, but not too light. A misjudged smiley face is likely to wind them up even more (:

6. Thou shalt actually help• If there’s one thing more aggravating than not being able to

reach customer service, it’s finding that the customer service doesn’t actually have the ability to help. Spare a thought for the poor intern you’ve sat in the office down the hall to “do” your social media. They are going to spend the day being virtually shouted at and they’ll probably end up wasting everyone’s time sending questions back up to their managers.

• Your customer support team on Twitter need to be informed and they need to be an integrated part of the whole team.

7. Thou shalt help without having to be asked

• Not everyone will come to you with their problems. Some may prefer to simply have a whinge to their followers and friends.

• Tweet Deck makes it very easy to keep an eye on tweets containing relevant keywords. You’ll be amazed how impressed a Twitter user will be when you step in and help them out without being asked directly.

8. Thou shalt actually answer the question(s)

• This may seem obvious but it’s all too easy to forget. Customers are looking for answers to their questions so if they ask when your service will be working again don’t give them the reason why the service is down. That wasn’t what they wanted to know! If you don’t know when it will be working again – explain what you’re doing to fix it and tell them you’ll inform them when you do know.

• Another easy mistake to make is to answer one of a customers questions but not the others if they’ve included more than one. Check that you’ve given all the information they’ve asked for because having to ask again will just make them angrier.

9. Thou shalt deploy the hashtag (wisely)

• If you know you’re going to be dealing with a lot of customer service enquires over a period of time, the Twitter hashtag can be a great help to you and your customers.

• It lets you separate issues and indicates clearly which you’re dealing with at any given time. It also allows people to quickly see which issues you’ve already been dealing with on your timeline; they may not need to ask you the same question themselves if they see you’ve already answered it.

• You might even want to pre-empt a wave of enquiries with an #ask hashtag (for instance, when launching a new service) but be very careful if you do as these can backfire.

10. Thou shalt not take it personally• Yes, Twitter can seem like an angry place at times. Don’t forget these are people

typing into their devices in a moment of stress. They’re not thinking of you, the customer service rep or community manager, as a person receiving these messages. In fact, they’ll often soften when you do respond in a calm and friendly manner.

• Whatever you do don’t go getting upset. Pointing out that your Twitter handle is technically the social media team and not the brand as a whole isn’t going to get people to warm to you, it will probably do the opposite. And whatever you do, don’t let the punctuation police get to you!