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Fostering Friendly Faces for Customer Service on Twitter

May 12, 2010 By 4 Comments

Many corporations are still using their corporate logo as their profile photo on Twitter. That’s a mistake — particularly for companies hoping to use Twitter to improve or enhance their customer service.

People want to talk to people on social networks — Not corporations.  That’s doubly true when it comes to unhappy customers.

Some companies, such as ComCast (@ComcastCares), take this to the extreme by using a single individual as their point of contact for addressing customer service issues on Twitter. While personal, this approach seems shortsighted since the relationships are ultimately based on a customer relationship with the company. Also, it’s nearly impossible for one individual to support the needs of a major brand on social platforms. Using a single individual as the face of customer service provides too much of an emphasis on that individual — instead of the dedicated teams that stand behind them and the company’s customer service promise.

That may be why most marketers (58% according to some surveys), such as Google (@google) prefer to use the corporate logo for their profile. Why? Using a corporate logo is the BEST WAY to connect the Twitter profile to the brand. It also sets expectations for  ’work centric’ content posts and ensures continuity of the profile over time. It also limits exposure if an employee has personal issues that could reflect poorly on the brand by association.

The best approach is to blend the extremes.  Some companies, such as Kodak (@kodakcb), create personal accounts for employees (separate from employee personal accounts) that integrate branding in the profile photo and handle. This provides a good blend of personal touch and corporate ownership. 

Other companies, such as American Family Insurance (@amfam) retain a single corporate account that utilizes the corporate logo — but creates a customized Twitter background that highlights team members responding to inquiries.  This allows outgoing posts to be branded from a single corporate identity. When the account is used to send personal messages, team members tag the message with a ‘CoTag’ that includes their initials (^TJ) to identify the sender. 

A CoTag is the individual signature of a user in a multi-user-account.  The term was created and popularized by CoTweet, a free service that makes it easy for multiple people to contribute to a single corporate Twitter account.  The added benefit of using this shared approach, and CoTweet, is that the infrastructure is free and turnkey. With CoTweet allows you to schedule Twitter posts, assigns followup activities and support multiple users for multiple Twitter accounts. The only thing lacking is a iPhone/iPad client for CoTweet, since monitoring and responding to Tweets can happen anytime.

Credits: Screenshot is from the Twitter account of American Family Insurance, the company I work for. I’m in the first photo, wearing a Threadless t-shirt that says ’To err is human. To arr is pirate.’ Good sentiment for customer service.

Friendly Faces

A friendly face is important for companies using social networks. Enjoy this primer on the face from Elmo and Ernie — courtesty of Sesame Street.

Further Reading:

Filed Under: google, Strategy, Twitter, word of mouth Tagged With: , , , , , ,
About Troy Janisch

Troy Janisch, Publisher of Social Meteor, is a digital marketing professional and social media beatnik. He is a contributor to SmartBrief on Social Media. Troy leads the marketing team at Sentry Insurance, but don’t let that scare you. He rarely talks about insurance in mixed company [grin]. Like a good social media program, SocialMeteor.com is all about content. It’s not a consulting company or marketing agency.

  • Terry Golesworthy

    A few points to raise. Comcast actually has 12-15 fulltime individuals supporting customers such as comcastbonnie, comcastgeorge etc. This approach is followed by Charter and to some extent by AT&T. Charter were burned a while back by imposters pretending to be from the company and have added a company name to their individual pictures. Most financial services companies use the ‘logo’ in part due to advice from compliance officers with reference to regulations in the US (all correspondence with a customer must be archived for 3 years, all advertisements must be pre-approved etc.) There are ways to deal with this but as a result, they are conservative. I would actually suggest the trend is away from people and towards company logos – people do not want a relationship with a company they want help. Look at Jetblue, Easyjet etc all are now ‘logoed’. Of the 15 Comcast people, who is on duty, who should I connect with? I really do not care, I just want to get help.

    The recently announced changes to Twitter for business will likely extend this trend as we come to see multi-user corporate twitter accounts.

    It is an area that interests me so the dialogue is a good thing….over to you

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  • http://www.linkedin.com/in/troyjanisch Troy Janisch

    I think there needs to be a balance. There needs to be a single account to go to. And, that account probably needs to be branded with a company logo. However, when I interact with a company, I want to know who I’m talking to. The CoTweet/Cotag combination works well.

    I think the key (right now) is to utilize your Twitter background to provide the ‘human’ layer. That will change over time, as business accounts evolve on Twitter from what they are today.

  • Terry Golesworthy

    I agree with the balanced approach. It must be obvious to the customer who to approach (or search for) but then engatge in a dilaog with a person. AT&T is agood example: ATTCustomerCare runda the group but has 15 or so individuals. ATTCustomercare (molly) has a face (not a logo) and the others all have faces but with ATT preceding their names. The question is whether this will change with the new Twitter business center allowing corporate ‘verified’ accounts and multiple users.