3 Companies Using Twitter for Better Customer Service

When you’re running a small business, it’s important to attend to customers wherever they are, whether it’s in your store or online.

Since you can instantly address customer concerns on Twitter, this free messaging service can help you build a brand that customers associate with high-quality customer service.

We take a look three companies that are successfully using Twitter for customer service:

Raven Internet Marketing Tools (@RavenPratt)
Nashville, Tenn.

Twitter is an ideal customer service tool for Raven Internet Marketing Tools, a company that provides online tools for SEO and social media marketing, since many of its customers use it.

Rather than having one corporate account, Raven employees engage customers through individual Twitter accounts that provide the employee’s name and photo. “Our hope is that by establishing a more personal relationship with our customers, it will create a better experience for them and help them identify with our company more,” says Taylor Pratt, product marketing manager for Raven Internet Marketing Tools. It has helped Raven build trust with clients, and customers often praise the company online.

Grasshopper LLC (@grasshopper)
Needham, Mass.

When your company offers products that may have technical glitches, it’s important to notify customers of problems immediately. When Grasshopper LLC, a virtual phone systems company, experienced an outage that shut down its service, it notified customers on Twitter. “It almost turned a 10-minute outage into a relatively positive thing as customers saw how quickly we reacted and how informative we were,” says Stephanie Bullis, ambassador of buzz for Grasshopper Group.

RightsFlow Inc. (@coversong)
New York City

Niche businesses can gain a foothold in their market by serving existing and potential customers on Twitter. RightsFlow Inc., a licensing and royalty service provider, uses Twitter for its Limelight service. Limelight allows musicians to obtain mechanical licenses for cover songs.

The company uses free tools like HootSuite and TweetDeck to monitor and respond to mentions of their brand and related keywords such as “cover song.” RightsFlow then guides users through the music licensing process. They often provide links to their FAQ pages and video FAQ section to answer questions. “Not only have we seen licensing conversions as a result, but we’ve also seen word-of-mouth [marketing] via Twitter as artists share the service,” says Michael Kauffman, senior vice president of sales and marketing.