subject: Twitter Chat for Customer Service [print this page] Twitter Chat for Customer Service Twitter Chat for Customer Service
Social media, especially Twitter, is becoming an increasingly important medium for businesses to connect with customers. Many businesses already use Twitter every day, integrating it into their marketing, public relations, and customer service. One popular use of this medium for business is Twitter chat. Twitter chat basically comes in two styles - group chat and individual chat. But which style is the best choice for business? The answer is both if a business wants to get the maximum benefit from its social presence. However for customer service, the individual chat is definitely the preferred choice.
Group chats on Twitter are characterized by the use of a hashtag (#). A hashtag allows participants in a chat to flag their tweets with a keyword. Then chat participants use third party software to extract all the tweets containing that hashtag from Twitter. One can think of the hashtag as a filter for all the possible tweets, only showing the tweets of interest. In order for this style of chat to work, participants need to agree on a common hashtag and remember to use that hashtag in their tweets. Lee Odden in "Twitter Marketing Tips: Twitter Chats and 8 Marketing and PR Chats to Follow"[1] gives the basics on running a group chat. Group chats are best used when there is a structured format and the schedule for the chat has been clearly communicated ahead of time. This means that this style is more suited to marketing or PR events and less so for customer service, where the bulk of communication occurs ad hoc and on a one-on-one basis.
Individual chats on Twitter can be public or private. Public chats require the use of the @ symbol to address a particular Twitter user. The use of the @ symbol coupled with a username is called a mention and can appear anywhere in a tweet. Private chats can be accomplished via a message (formerly known as a direct message). Unlike mentions, users can only send messages to other users who are followers. Because it is impractical to follow every customer, businesses integrating Twitter into customer service focus on mentions. However using mentions for customer service is not without its challenges.
Perhaps the biggest challenge in harnessing mentions for customer service chat is overcoming the one-to-one problem. That is, how can a company accept incoming chats from individuals and route those chats to multiple customer service agents who are available to answer the chat? Moreover, once the one-to-many routing is accomplished, how can customer service agents coordinate to provide a singular response? The mention chat model connects two user accounts together through tweets and makes the assumption that those two accounts represent two individuals. For businesses, the username is actually a facade that encapsulates many employees. A bit of third party software magic is required to successfully eliminate this challenge for customer service. Unfortunately, there are not a lot of options available on the market today that offer this functionality.
My Customer Cloud is an example of a currently available software solution that overcomes the one-to-many problem; it also offers mention chat integration with instant messaging aggregators like Meebo, Pidgin or iChat. Additional software solutions are sure to become available as using Twitter for customer service becomes more popular.
