“If you’re trying to hide from your customers, don’t use Twitter.”

Increasingly, corporate giants like Comcast, PepsiCo, JetBlue Airways, Kodak and others are beefing up direct communications with shoppers through social-media tools like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. The popular social networks have helped companies quickly and cheaply reply to consumer beefs, answer questions and tailor service and goods. It has bolstered current consumer services, easing the load on call centers and expensive mailers that most customers don’t like anyhow.

Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and online software services like LiveOps, Salesforce.com and RightNow Technologies are all are getting used to improve customer service, keep users and gain a competitive advantage. As more corporations effectively use social-media tools for customer care, it is also becoming better to shift customer-relations resources to the U.S. and feed into the growing “homeshoring” trend. Home based employees are now becoming a trend among companies that take advantage of improved technology, gain productiveness from staff no longer tied to long commutes and leverage the experience of local employees. Several companies with vast call-center operations overseas plan to shift some jobs back to U.S. soil.   The advances in technology will allow companies to create virtual call centers staffed with veterans, the unemployed, college graduates and retirees, working from home.

Twitter allows companies to see in real-time what their buyers think, and they can learn a lot from that.  The greatest benefit of Twitter is “listening for the point of need”.  Finding out where the company could do something to fulfill that need.  Our short experience shows that people express their needs more on Twitter than on any other social network.  This is understandable, since you can quickly jot down a tweet, whereas a letter or even an email takes much more time.

The more ways you provide customers to get in touch with you, the more likely you are able to satisfy them.  When you show your customers that you are willing to listen to them, you create loyal followers.  For most people call centers are too maddening, with long waits and inexperienced, bad-English speaking agents.  Email is too slow in an age of instantaneous online communications. This doesn’t mean that call centers are a thing of the past though. Twitter is for basic troubleshooting and can be used as an addition to the traditional phone support.  Many people are still like to call on the phone, mostly because they haven’t even heard of Twitter.

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