I have to admit, when Twitter first launched, I didn’t really see business value in it. I thought, sure, you can get all your friends signed up and have mailing-list type of collaboration via SMS – yay. Just another time suck online that extends to your cell phone.
I have changed my mind.
Not in a personal sense, but for actually useful business applications. I still don’t use Twitter on a personal level all that much.
Here are 4 practical and useful business applications of Twitter that can save you money, generate revenue, increase customer satisfaction, and possibly even a combination of these things.
1. Customer Support:
I’m an Enom Reseller, mostly because it allows me to help my customers without me having to keep track of different logins for all my clients. I can log in to my account and get access to all my clients’ accounts to make any changes that I need to through my main profile. Yes, it works great. Until Enom is down for hours upon hours, as happened about a week ago. People are calling me. I’m calling Enom. I’m looking for a non-existent system status page on Enom. I’m looking for a blog post that says “we’re down but working on it.” I search Twitter for #enom. No luck. So I’m on the phone for 15 minutes on hold, probably due to countless other people on the phone for the same reasons. If Enom had a Twitter account that was updated, they could have broadcast a message that said “we’re down, but working on it. Keep following on Twitter and we will post status updates” which would have eliminated my phone call to them, plus countless others. A very similar situation happened with Tmobile’s 3G service a few days ago. How many phone calls did they get? Each 800 call costs money, and each minute of a CSR’s time on the phone costs money, not to mention the dissatisfaction for customers waiting 20 minutes to talk to someone. If you had Twitter, you could have published a message and decreased the amount of calls and been proactive in letting your customers know about the issue. Folks talk about being proactive in the boardroom all the time, but it’s rarely implemented – and I don’t know why.
2. Promoting Yourself:
Gasp! Did I really say that? Don’t folks on Twitter want it to be spam free? Of course. It’s not about spamming, it’s about providing relevant information to your customer base. One example that has stuck in my head has been a restaurant that has a blue-plate lunch special, or information about opening a new restaurant (or other service). If I follow the restaurant, and they post “Today’s special is X” every day, I can get useful information about what their special is for the day and make a decision on whether I want to go there for lunch or not. The same concept can apply to bars for happy hour specials, band of the night, etc. You’re not spamming since you’re only sending the information to those who have opted in via following you. Keep it relevant and keep it useful as a part of an overall strategy to inform your customers and you’re golden.
3. Concierge service:
Travel Portland has started utilizing a Twisitor’s Center to work as a concierge type of service for people looking for information about PDX via Twitter. This is genious in my opinion, and a great way to provide people with instant access to answers. If you’re a visitor’s bureau or destination marketing organization, you should learn from this and follow suite.
4. Customer Feedback:
Any organization who actually cares about what their customers/vendors/partners think should put a little effort into monitoring, if not interacting on Twitter. You can get valuable information about the issues that your non-internal relationships are facing. As an example, I made a phone call to Wells Fargo the other day to resolve an issue, and totally got the runaround. It took me 4 people and about 2 hours to resolve it, due in no small amount to someone who actually a) cared and b) acted on it. The problem was solved in 10 minutes through this person’s efforts. I want to commend that person and at the same time let Wells know how jacked up the rest of their stuff is. They spent a total of 2-3 man hours to fix a 10-minute problem. They frustrated a customer. This, unfortunately is the norm. If you use Twitter to listen to what people are saying about your organization, you can learn from it to improve and make changes that save the organization money, and also improve customer satisfaction. Sure, everyone is about phone surveys and other crap, but what about having someone who can make a decision and effect change listening via Twitter and able to reply and talk directly with your customer? Anyone see value in this besides me?
Most of these are simple to implement. Sure, I get the fact that it’s just another thing to update but that’s not really the case. If you set up a blog, you can automatically tweet via your RSS from the blog (or just one category of the blog) using something like EasyTweets.com and you have an automated machine to at least post status updates, at a minimum. You can also tie Twitter to Facebook and extend that reach.
These are just a few random ideas. I’d love to hear thoughts from other people on practical applications for Twitter via comments on this post and hopefully other people take notice of this so they can implement these ideas and be more efficient, save money, and provide better customer service.