Any time you open more channels of communication with your customers you’re going to increase your opportunities to deliver stellar customer service. But as a work-at-home mom running your own business, you still have to be selective about the means you employ to connect with your clients and the consumer marketplace in general. For one thing, you don’t want to spend all of your time performing customer service. When would you get your actual work done? In short, having too many platforms for communication could end up being a bad thing. Additionally, you need to keep your personal and professional spheres separate to some degree, even though you work from home, which means you cannot allow for direct contact unless it is limited to work hours. For this reason, you likely have a P.O. Box, a work email, and a dedicated work phone that goes to voicemail when you’re off the clock. But what about social media? Is there a way you can use these popular communications tools to better serve your customers, and possibly even yourself?
In fact, there are a number of ways that social media platforms can contribute to the customer service experience while also helping you to cut back on the amount of time you spend helping your clients. Of course, you will still have to communicate with them directly on any number of occasions, but social media can provide you with plenty of tools designed for delivering missives en masse. What this means is that with a little planning you should be able to anticipate some of the needs of your customers and provide them with the information and solutions they need upfront, rather than having to answer the same questions over and over again for different people.
For example, you could use your Twitter feed to provide links to samples of your latest work for prospective clients to peruse. And you could certainly use accounts on Facebook and Google+ to provide information to all of your customers as well as offer them with a means of contacting you concerning business matters. But of course, you can also use these platforms in a less direct fashion to find out whether or not your clients are satisfied with your service. Thanks to the many tracking tools that are offered by these social networks and third-party developers, you can follow hashtags and keywords to see when you’re mentioned elsewhere. This can be a handy way to discover if customers have complaints that they express to the public but fail to bring to your attention, giving you the opportunity to correct the issues by contacting them directly.
Social media also provides clients with a fast and easy way to communicate with you (unlike email and voice messages that you might not get right away) since you can monitor it throughout the day via alerts when you have messages. As a result, you can immediately acknowledge that you have received a question or complaint. Even if you don’t have time to address it immediately, you can offer your clients the instant gratification that they crave. While you can certainly offer an email address for contact on your website and you can hire a call center-like continental message solution to handle your incoming phone calls, social media provides you with one more tool in your communications arsenal. And with more and more people relying on these platforms as their main avenue of connection to the world, it’s not a bad idea to get on board and see what kinds of options they can offer you and your clients in the way of customer service solutions.