Connect with Customers: Social Media, The Ultimate Customer Service Tool

I discovered a new blog today:  Customers Rock! written by Becky Carroll. She’s written a two part posting offering suggestions for using social media to enhance your customer service offerings.  Social media – great tools for your customer toolbox.

In part one of Using Social Media to Build Customer Loyalty Becky talks about using social media to keep customers informed and to strengthen relationships.  The beauty of the new interactive qualities of Web 2.0 is the ability for customers and prospects to respond back; offering opinions, questions and comments.  If we are OPEN to the conversation- this two-way relationship will only make us a stronger more customer-focused business.

Yesterday on Twitter Guy Kawasaki – a professed Obama supporter – left a tweet stating that he planned on flooding Twitter with value based tweets just to frustrate those McCain supporters who took offense to the fact that he’d changed his Avitar to the Obama logo.  He reached out with both hands to his followers and said “This is who I am, this is who I support and hopefully you can look past that to the value that am about to bring to the conversation.” (actually he didn’t SAY that – I’m reading between the lines.)  What transpired was more than an hour of tweets from Guy pointing followers to video, blogs, articles and more.  His followers began to weigh in – commenting on people who had stopped following him because of his political beliefs.  They commented on the great stuff he was sharing and one follower said “I don’t care who you vote for; value is value and I’m enjoying what you have to say.”

Social media allows us to have on-going, honest exchange with our audience, our customers.  Connecting around the world with kindred spirits.  Are you using social media to reach out to your target prospects, customers and peers? 

In part two of using Social Media to build Customer Loyalty, Becky shares the story of how Zappos is using Twitter to connect with customers:

The culture at Zappos.com is very people-focused and empowers employees.  Zappos.com has many of their employees Twittering; 448 to be exact!  You can track their tweets via this microsite, where you can also track mentions of Zappos.com and some of the brands they carry.  Using Twitter is encouraged as a great way to stay transparent and authentic with customers.  Tony is their CEO, and he leads the way by tweeting about his travels, tours he gives of the Zappos.com headquarters, requests for feedback from customers, and contests he runs.  Customers even make suggestions via Twitter, the most recent of which was to list a short url on each product page that can be easily cut and pasted into blogs, email, Twitter, etc. so they can be shared with others (it is called zapp.me).  Tony has over 13,000 people following his Tweets to get this kind of information.

Customers Rock! take on Zappos.com and Twitter: Zappos customers are extremely loyal to the company for several reasons: great customer service, an easy return policy (free shipping on returns!), and employees that care.  Social Media at Zappos.com, including Twitter and their blogs, has been a great way to put a face on the company, make them feel approachable, get instant customer feedback, and create a two-way dialog that builds customer relationships.  Zappos is truly a Customers Rock! company.

Yesterday, John Jantsch announced the upcoming conference in San Jose that will feature how Big Companies are using Social Media to grow their business.  If you aren’t actively using social media to reach your customers – what’s stopping you?

Time?

Knowledge?

Desire?