How does the communication with the customer change

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To engage with customers, it is no longer enough to have an email address and customer service number on one’s website. Today, people want to interact with and engage businesses via their chosen means of communication, whether that is Twitter, Facebook, discussion forums, or a feedback site like Get Satisfaction.

Companies like Dell, for example, have fully embraced multiple channels of support. Their community site lists all the ways customers can connect with them through Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, forums, blogs, email, and more. Dell wants people to be able to connect with them through whatever channel is most comfortable.

Best Buy Co., the world’s largest electronics retailer, has a customer-service team that use Twitter to answer questions about products to help increase sales.

So what is the lesson of that? Rather than expect customers to communicate through your chosen means, allow them to do so through their chosen means.

But don’t start a Twitter account unless you want to use it.

@TimeWarnerCares opened a Twitter account, which has 565 followers. @TimeWarnerCares didn’t bother to follow anyone, so they have no way to know who wants to talk with them. Who is Tweeting for the company? There’s no way to know because there’s no bio, no photo, no link to a website, and there has not been one Tweet since someone had the brilliant idea to “try social media.”

Don’t use #hashtags like Habitat!

UK retailer Habitat joined Twitter in June 2009 and soon began marketing its products via links to its site and catalogue. The company employed “hashtags” – related keywords added to the end of Tweets to improve positioning in search results – to boost their hit rate.

While this is common practice on Twitter Habitat used hashtags related to the popular search terms at the time: iPhone, Iran election and Mousavi being the three most popular. Anyone searching on the site for information for the Iranian election was presented with a link to Habitat’s latest catalogue.

HabitatUK even used an Iranian election hashtag, and threw one in for True Blood fans too, both trying to get people to signup to a database:

The Twitter community reacted angrily to the messages, with some accusing Habitat of spamming the site.

The bottom line is that it was a serious misjudgement. They have used a political and human situation that many people are concerned about, to market their products and services and that is not right.

Habitat had to apologies: “Habitat sorry for Iran Tweeting”