Social media (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) is becoming more and more important, not just for getting new business, but for staying in contact with your current customers or clients; and it is starting to become the case that it is the customer's preferred way to contact you AND be responded to.
In a previous blog post I said you didn't have to do social media, and that still holds. If customers know you don't have a Twitter or Facebook presence then they won't try and contact you through those mediums. However, if you do use them then you need to check your Facebook page or your Twitter account regularly (at least 2 or 3 times a day), otherwise you might miss an important message from a customer and it could lose you business.
Two examples:
With our call answering service, some of our clients let us know at the last minute that they are transferring their calls to us. More of them are starting to send us direct (private) messages through Twitter as to what to tell their callers. We also get the occasional notification through Facebook about a client about to transfer their calls. So, it is now imperative that our telephonists have access to the Twitter and Facebook accounts so they can see messages coming in from clients.
A little while ago we took a call for one of our online retailer who has a Facebook presence. The caller asked a question, but mentioned that she had also posted it on the Facebook page. When our telephonist asked to take the caller's telephone number so our client could call them back, she replied “No, that's okay; if they can just post the answer on their Facebook page, that would be great”.
So, if you have the time to put into social media then it can provide benefits in ways you wouldn't necessarily expect. At the end of the day, if your customers want to contact you through Twitter, why stop them?
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