Customer support via social media: dos and don'ts

Do:

• Have a strategy. What is your end-game in using social media (SM)? If you're going to invest resources, know what you want to achieve.
  
• Do respond to posts about problems quickly - ideally within a day. The longer you leave it, the more chance of growing anger and shrillness, and retweets/forwards/shares.
  
• Do ensure you have a clear escalation path and someone with enough clout on the team to make sure problems in other departments can be sorted out.
  
• Do have a written policy covering who can respond online, and guidelines on brand, tone, language, etc.
  
• Do keep a level head; think before you act.
  
• Do keep records of responses - you may need to review actions later (eg make sure your Twitter feed, etc is being logged).
  
• Do understand you can't respond to everything - but also don't get into an 'only respond to influential people with lots of connections' pattern. 'SM elitism' will come back to haunt you.
  
• Do make it someone's job to pay attention and listen, and use an online monitoring system to find blind-spots that you're missing.
  
• Do be careful and pay attention. When mistakes happen in SM channels, they're out in the open for everyone to see.

Don't:

• Don't make promises you can't keep to an agitated SM user.
  
• Don't lose your cool - never send a response if you're angry. Step away from the keyboard, think about it, then act.
  
• Don't try be too 'funny'. One man's witticism can be another man's infuriating display of patronising dismissal.
  
• Don't put your most junior person on the SM job; below is a short presentation on the kind of skills that are desirable.
  Social Media -- In Real Life

  View more presentations from Sentient Communications.

• Don't allow your SM response team to get sucked into becoming the first-line customer support team. If your customers are tweeting to get a response, it's because the proper channels are broken. Fix them.
  
• Don't be teaching your customers to behave badly - if getting hysterical online is the only approach that works, you'll be training them to get hysterical online habitually.
  
• Don't let SM's 24x7 nature dictate your company response times. If you're not a 24x7 business, you don't want to create an expectation you'll respond at 3am on Sunday morning.
  
• Don't abruptly abandon your online response presence. If you start, you can't simply stop.