Social media - Customer Support tool

Social media is a time consuming machine. If the employees of the company spend 1 hour a day in Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn and local or interest based social networks, their productivity is decreased. As the responsible person in the company you could think of some financial losses and possible sanctions for employees, but please be careful. Prohibition will not solve the problem. It is better to use such employees by turning them into company's Live Support managers. That will be beneficial to all and will not require lots of additional investment (both financial and human resource one).

Lots of service providers have the live support features in their websites. Look at Host1Plus live support section! It is not an easy task to handle all these requests, but Host1Plus is a hosting service which needs to be operating 24/7/365. Most of companies do not need such complicated and costly services, but that does not mean they should neglect Live Support activities at all. Small business Live Support features can be easily transferred to most popular Social Medias.

As you can see, there is quite a little investment to the Live Support in Social Medias. Also the employees who are "too deep" into social media can be used for branding and advertising needs. Of course someone will need to give them some advice how not to become annoying promoter and spammers. In one of my previous blogs entries about traffic boost, I have already mentioned, that it is very important to convince not the first line of potential customers, but present your brand in such way, that their friends will promote your business themselves. The supporting staff should know this rule and do everything to make sure that happy customer delivers the message to his/her friends in the social network. "Word of mouth" marketing is essential now, so live support should serve this purpose very well.

Twitter is one of the best ways to make a support as it is visible to everyone. It is not a private live chat where you can speak about weather and dress color of the employee. Twitter makes your support public, so you better provide best services. There are lots of success stories about Twitter becoming the perfect tool for support. The classic one is shoe retailer Zappos.com, but there are few more. They have made their millions of $, why can't you?

The live support is about answering the questions and providing the official point of view to one or another service or product of particular company. Every social media, which have status updates can do the support work. One of the most developed platforms for live support is Facebook. If Twitter endorses the group of employees talking about their company (more employees on Twitter - better visibility), product or service, Facebook encourages companies to Brand themselves using Facebook Pages.

The Facebook page has a brilliant feature - all fans of the page with administrator rights can speak on behalf of the company without showing their real face. If you are a customer and you want to complain about something or ask a question, you can be sure that one of responsible employees will answer your inquiry. In Twitter you need to ask, which of employees can help you with your issue - Jim, Alison or Peter? Facebook also allow more interactive share of information as visitor can provide the screenshot of error, post a video with broken product which was sent by post, or give a link to technical description and ask the specific question about the product. The same can be done in Twitter, but information will be scattered among lots of Twitter image, video or file sharing services (what can be too complicated for beginning Twitter user).

The live support features must be embedded into company's website. Sometimes they are too complicated and require lots of coding (that means additional expenses for site administrator or website Design Company). Recently Facebook announced about the possibility to embed the Fan Page box easily, which allow becoming Fan without going to Facebook. This is one step forward to the live support tool via Facebook. Twitter API can also be used for collecting the tweets from your clients and respond them publicly or in DM (Direct Message). The simplest way is to create a couple of buttons with the text "Got Question? Post them to our Twitter!" or "Join our Facebook Fan page and our employees will HELP You!" (of course the texts should be shorter and clearer ;)) .

Live support is also the best way to check the loyalty of the employees. Those who do not brag about company achievements should be observed very closely. Well, this is social networking paranoia issue which needs separate investigation ;)
I have mentioned only 2 most popular social networks and ways how to do the live support there. As mentioned before EVERY social network with status updates, image, video, link sharing options and mass message to all friends can do the Support. So MySpace, Orkut, Netlog, Tagged etc can do the same.
LinkedIn is little different as professional information is the main scope there, not status updates. However it can be used for branding and B2B support. Do not forget you local social networks or interest passed ones.
A simple forum topic in your local community forum, where you or your colleagues present themselves as working with specific product, can bring wonderful results (My neighbor plumber is so busy that I had to wait for him a week to fix some small issues in my bathroom. It happened after his wife announced his phone number in local community forum).