When you’re thinking about your customer touchpoints, are you considering other ways customers may try to communicate with you or about you? Are your company or products mentioned on social media by customers having problems? While you may have the greatest customer support process in the world, it’s only good if people are actually using it to let you know about problems. Even if you’re not doing any other type of social media outreach, at the very least, monitoring for mentions of your company and products can go a long way for improving your online reputation.
Social Support
While you may have a customer support process, a phone number, a nifty web page for submitting problems, customers are going to do whatever is easiest for them. It used to be that they’d ask friends or family for help in person or by phone. Now people are also reaching out to their social network for assistance.
So when someone has a problem with your products, they may not even bother with your support, they may post a problem or question online. They don’t care about your process. They just want help — from anyone who is willing to give it.
Knowing About Problems
By monitoring social media (which is pretty easy with tools like Google Alerts, Twitter Search, Social Mention or NetVibes), you can be the one that provides assistance. You can only solve a problem when you know about it, but don’t expect people to come to you. Listen for problems and reach out with answers.
Giving in to Your Competition
If you’re not monitoring social media and helping people when they have problems or questions, either someone else will or people will be turned off and go elsewhere. Just about everyone has competitors these days. Why make it easy for a customer to choose someone else?
What monitoring do you do for customer service? And how?
(image by jayhem)