As we've previously discussed on the Nurph Blog, Twitter is a great first point of contact for customer support.
For the Customer: As a customer you can quickly & easily tweet a question to a Twitter account such as @Dell, and the Twitter account can reply in real-time. This is a world away from the alternative route of having to Google the name of a company, scan through the results for the official website (then the website in your language, assuming an international company), scour the website for the "Contact Us" section, and to either find the right email address, or to fight through a tedious Contact Us form which usually fails to send you a copy of the message that you send through (for later reference purposes).
For the Company: As the company and customer support provider, Twitter gives you an aesthetically pleasing, friendly, and easily identified point of contact for your customers which encourages their intial question to be brief and to the point. Also, because Twitter is public chatter, other customers can see the conversation that is happening around your Twitter account and join in with it, learn from it, and potentially avoid asking you the same question twice.
Problem: But once a customer has established contact with a company via the first tweet, the conversation is quickly stifled by Twitter's user experience. You can't get in to a "real-time" chat whereby you can really feel like the questions are being answered efficiently, tweets start flying to & fro, the results of the conversations are quickly lost in the maze of @replies and short lived search results, and it's tricky to share a coherent conversation transcript which other people could read and benefit from.
Solution: However, if you use your Nurph Channel in combination with your Twitter account you can bring your Twittering customers in to a real-time discussion channel which ties directly in to Twitter (or vice versa if you invite a company Twitter account in to your own Nurph Channel). Nurph offers free flowing conversation, it fosters a real-time community who could help answer your questions for you, and it gives you transcripts which are easy to refer back to at any time. Just take the following simple steps to get up & running with your Nurph Channel for improved customer support on Twitter:
- Join your Nurph Channel by typing your Twitter username in to http://Nurph.com
- Tweet about your Nurph Channel
- Update your Twitter profile info to include a link to your Nurph Channel
- Tweet links to your Nurph Channel whenever you get in to longer conversations on Twitter and start chatting in a real-time Channel
- Keep your Nurph Channel open in a browser tab during certain hours of the day for drop-in sessions
- Encourage your trusted Twitter community members to hang out in your Nurph Channel and to answer questions for you.
- Use Bufferapp to schedule tweets that remind your Twitter users to stop by and leave real-time feedback in your Nurph Channel
Do you have any further tips for improving customer support on Twitter? Let us know in the comments.