Last week I received the following email from Dan Kassis, an employee in the Digital Media Production department at LifeWay Christian Resources here in Nashville. Dan’s one of several LifeWay employees using Twitter to help customers and his email below is a great example of what can happen when a company starts to answer their social phone.

I saw a tweet from a pastor who said that we should fix our online ordering
system because it’s “a mess.” I replied directly to him asking for more
information. I wanted to know if it was our online catalog or the online
order form that was giving him trouble. He replied with more information.
So I gave him my email address and told him to give me detailed information
on his problems. I assured him that I would forward it to people who could
help, or who would at least listen to what he was saying. I also explained
that we are beginning a process to make major improvements to lifeway.com.

The next day I saw a tweet from the pastor who said that he is “very
impressed with LifeWay’s Twitter-based customer service.” Now, we don’t
exactly have Twitter-based customer service. I mean, not in an organized
sense. What we have are several people on Twitter who are watching what
people say about LifeWay and responding professionally and with attention
to the customer. But now this customer’s perception of our company has
changed. And we weren’t even able to immediately fix his problem. But in a
way we still met a need.

[Full disclosure: Dan gave permission to republish the text of the entire email.]
[Full disclosure, part 2: LifeWay is a MicroExplosion Media client.]
[Full disclosure, part 3: Dan is related to me. He's not a brother or uncle. It's more distant than that...something like my wife's uncle is his wife's brother...I think. Still, we're related.]
[Full disclosure, part 4: I've never had this many "full disclosures" for any single post...ever.]

Tags: customer service, LifeWay, responding in social media, social media marketing strategy, social media monitoring, social phone, twitter

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 16th, 2008 at 12:17 pm and is filed under social media marketing, social media monitoring, social phone, twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.