Social Media as a Customer Service Tool

by Jared Miller

According to Mashable, about 80% of companies planned to use social media for customer service by the start of this year; about 62% of consumers had already used social media to address customer service issues. What’s scary is that the top 50 brands ignored 71% of customers’ complaints on Twitter.

Social media is word-of-mouth to the n^th degree. Consider the impact of an unhappy customer telling friends and family about a bad experience through traditional means of communication. When that happens, it harms your relationship with a small network of people. In most cases, you will have already missed (or messed up) your opportunity to resolve the issue with customer service. Now put that unhappy customer on social media. Two things happen: their reach grows exponentially and you have another opportunity to engage with them.

Failing to respond to negative comments on social media is kind of like saying “no comment” during an interview: whether or not you’re guilty, it looks like you’ve got something to hide.  Because social media is a public conversation, how you respond to (or ignore) negative comments influences the perceptions of a broad and sometimes unintended audience.

Five tips for successful social media customer service:

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