When customers have a bad experience with a brand, there’s a good chance they’re going to tweet about it. To help brands improve their customer interactions, Twitter recently released a 122-page customer service playbook. Clearly this is a serious topic since a social media platform known for brevity decided to devote more than a 100 pages covering it.
So how does better customer service on Twitter affect PR? An article by Mashable pointed out “the biggest overlap between PR and social media comes down to customer support. A poorly executed social campaign – or even something as seemingly innocuous as a response to a customer complaint on Twitter – can easily turn into a PR nightmare.”
While reading through the seven steps to customer service on Twitter, I realized they could also be used to build an effective PR plan. The seven steps are:
1. Set Your Vision: Right now at Communiqué, we’re hard at work responding to RFPs and developing presentations for new business opportunities. One of the first things we like to do is research the company and determine what their vision is, what the public’s perception is, and what we think it should be. Identifying the vision helps you to understand the results a company wants and allows you to build a plan to achieve them.
2. Size and Prioritize Your Opportunities: A good PR strategy will outline which opportunities make sense to pursue first and the amount of work needed to make them happen. For example, you could recommend a client pursue a high-profile speaking event to build buzz and then suggest a bylined article to follow up on the momentum.
3. Define the Customer Service Experience: According to Twitter’s playbook, defining the customer service experience consists of five components: establishing the brand voice, delivering relevant content, optimizing response timing, and establishing community. These same components can be applied to effective media pitching. When introducing a journalist to a company, you want to be sure you’re making the right impression, offering them useful information, responding quickly, and building rapport.
4. Set Goals for Performance Metrics: PR should be used to help a company achieve a number of its business objectives. Goals can range from securing four articles in business outlets or submitting three award nominations per quarter. Refer back to the company’s vision and make sure your PR goals directly align with achieving it.
5. Establish the Measurement Mechanism: Decide how you’re going to determine whether or not you’re successful in meeting those goals. Are there certain media outlets the company wants to be featured in? Is there an event or speaking opportunity an executive would like to attend? Establishing how you’re going to measure success for a client allows everyone to understand the desired end result and work towards the same goal.
6. Operationalize Your Strategy: Now it’s time to put that plan into action. Assembling the right team members and developing workflow processes are critical to implementing your strategy. For example, at Communiqué, we use Smartsheet to organize tasks and to create transparency on the account. These documents allow us to see the status of assigned projects and easily update the client on progress.
7. Iterate and Innovate While it may make sense to stick to tried-and-true practices for some things, it’s important to be open to new ideas. Maybe that’s exploring the use of a live video streaming app like Periscope or producing a podcast. You may not be a fan of a particular new trend or tool, but the key is to be aware of what’s out there so you can present an educated recommendation to your client.
In summary, Twitter’s customer service steps not only help brands avoid a potential PR crisis, they also serve as a guide to craft a successful PR strategy for clients.
Want to read all 122 pages of the playbook? You can download it here.