Twitter has provided a platform for brands and customers to communicate more easily than ever before. It's a fantastic opportunity to provide real-time customer service. But it also brings the potential for a fantastic, and public, fail. Follow these 10 commandments to make sure you end up on the winning side in the Twitter customer service revolution.

2. Twitter has provided a platform for brands and
customers to communicate more easily than
ever before. It’s a fantastic opportunity to
provide real-time customer service. But it also
brings the potential for a fantastic, and public,
fail. Follow these 10 commandments to make
sure you end up on the winning side in the
Twitter customer service revolution.

3. 1. Thou shalt be on Twitter
• The old saying goes: if you’re not talking about
your brand on Twitter everyone else will be. First
things first – if you haven’t already, get yourself a
presence on Twitter.
• If you don’t, then expect to be bad-mouthed
behind your back. Modern customers absolutely
expect to find someone to complain to on Twitter
and many won’t look further when they don’t
find you there. They’ll just stir up trouble.

4. 2. Thou shalt not go silent
• If you are on Twitter, make sure you’re actually monitoring it. Leaving complaints
unanswered will only frustrate people more. You may feel like you have better
things to do but fairly soon you’ll have a Twitter “storm” on your hands.
• Disgruntled customers tend to pour their anger into their keyboards in
frustration. But in fact they often turn quite pleasant when they receive a polite
and helpful response.
• Whatever you do don’t tweet about your latest ad while people are struggling to
access your malfunctioning service. Buffer is a terrific tool but it can cause
people to think you’re ignoring their cries for help if something goes wrong and
you’re not actually online but appear to be posting.

5. • If you’re the type of brand that needs to deal with
customer service on a regular basis you should
consider having a designated account for such things.
• It will allow you to deal with problems more efficiently
and give customers a clear place to direct their queries.
It also means your community management team can
focus on their specific areas of expertise.
3. Thou shalt have a separate
account
• Most importantly it means
your branding account won’t
be cluttered up with the day
to day dealing with
complaints.

6. 4. Thou shalt make it personal
• A very effective way to add a personal touch to your customer
service is to add the name of the individual dealing with an issue to
their tweets.
• This is standard procedure for call centres so why not Twitter? It
allows the complainant to feel that they are dealing with a human
being. It also helps them understand when there has been a change
in shift so the new administrator may not be aware of a problem
they’ve been discussing over time.

7. 5. Thou shalt get the tone right
• Responding to people in a polite, charming and helpful way is
no mean feat, especially when you only have 140 characters
to play with.
• But it is vitally important that you are able to find the right
tone when dealing with customer service on Twitter. The best
tend to keep things short and sweet. Give them the
information they need to solve their problem, don’t waffle on
with excuses.
• Be light and cheerful, to dispel bad feelings,
but not too light. A misjudged smiley face is
likely to wind them up even more (:

8. 6. Thou shalt actually help
• If there’s one thing more aggravating than not being able to
reach customer service, it’s finding that the customer
service doesn’t actually have the ability to help. Spare a
thought for the poor intern you’ve sat in the office down
the hall to “do” your social media. They are going to spend
the day being virtually shouted at and they’ll probably end
up wasting everyone’s time sending questions back up to
their managers.
• Your customer support team on Twitter need to be
informed and they need to be an integrated part of the
whole team.

9. 7. Thou shalt help without having to
be asked
• Not everyone will come to you with their problems. Some
may prefer to simply have a whinge to their followers and
friends.
• Tweet Deck makes it very
easy to keep an eye on
tweets containing relevant
keywords. You’ll be amazed
how impressed a Twitter
user will be when you step
in and help them out
without being asked
directly.

10. 8. Thou shalt actually answer the
question(s)
• This may seem obvious but it’s all too easy to forget.
Customers are looking for answers to their questions so if
they ask when your service will be working again don’t give
them the reason why the service is down. That wasn’t what
they wanted to know! If you don’t know when it will be
working again – explain what you’re doing to fix it and tell
them you’ll inform them when you do know.
• Another easy mistake to make is to answer one of a
customers questions but not the others if they’ve included
more than one. Check that you’ve given all the information
they’ve asked for because having to ask again will just make
them angrier.

11. 9. Thou shalt deploy the hashtag
(wisely)
• If you know you’re going to be dealing with a lot of customer
service enquires over a period of time, the Twitter hashtag can be a
great help to you and your customers.
• It lets you separate issues and indicates clearly which you’re dealing
with at any given time. It also allows people to quickly see which
issues you’ve already been dealing with on your timeline; they may
not need to ask you the same question themselves if they see
you’ve already answered it.
• You might even want to pre-empt a wave of enquiries with an #ask
hashtag (for instance, when launching a new service) but be very
careful if you do as these can backfire.

12. 10. Thou shalt not take it personally
• Yes, Twitter can seem like an angry place at times. Don’t forget these are
people typing into their devices in a moment of stress. They’re not
thinking of you, the customer service rep or community manager, as a
person receiving these messages. In fact, they’ll often soften when you do
respond in a calm and friendly manner.
• Whatever you do don’t go getting upset. Pointing out that your Twitter
handle is technically the social media team and not the brand as a whole
isn’t going to get people to warm to you, it will probably do the opposite.
And whatever you do, don’t let the punctuation police get to you!