Use Social Media, Keep Your Customers Happy

I was really pissed. After trying to do some changes to my company’s DNS records, I ran into bureaucratic hell. I called, they opened a ticket. Two days later the ticket prompted me to call. After the call, I received an email about additional information. I was pissed, and I vented on Twitter:

Fifteen minutes later, I received a direct message from a Network Solutions representative:

netsolcares @jungleg Hey if your having an issue I’d love to help

An hour later my problem was fixed.

The moral of the story: social media can be the most cost-effective way to change a perception about your brand. I can’t say I love Network Solutions now, but it did stop me from flying off to their closest competitor who has been after my account for months.

In these hard economic times, it’s more crucial than ever to keep clients happy and the feedback loop is narrower than ever thanks to the magic of the web. The benefit is two-fold: you can get valuable information to improve your service, and your customer will feel like a king, pampered and happy.

If you are a company that offers a service to customers, here are some services that you can use to allow you to keep the conversation flowing in a positive direction:

• Twitter search  + RSS: You can set up a Twitter Search with your website, company name or service as keywords, and then feeding this to any RSS reader. For example, this is the Twitter Search page for Kodak.
• Community feedback sites: Get Satisfaction is a free site that allows you to setup a safe environment where people can voice their opinions, share information and voice their complaints. When you setup your page, you are clearly identified as a company representative, and the site offers an API to integrate with your existing site. A similar service is UserVoice, which offers user voting for features you want to work on next.
• Facebook Pages: this is a free service that allows the creation of a business presence on the popular site. You can sign up in this page.
• FriendFeed Rooms: the popular lifestream aggregator offers areas where users can exchange information. Although the demo here will be much more technical than what you might get on Facebook, it might be the right approach if you want to reach early adopters. See this example of the Pepsi room on FriendFeed

To read other applications you might use, read this interesting post by the Stratius Group.

I also want to send a shoutout to my Ning customer rep, Laura, who, like Network Solutions, helped me whenever I’ve had issues with my site, Oyeme.

Tagged as: business, customer, Facebook, FriendFeed, getsatisfaction, issues, networksolutions, ning, service, social, Twitter, uservoice