Tip with a tweet for great customer service

When you have a great customer experience at a restaurant, you probably leave a generous tip, smile, and personally thank your server. Same for a cab driver that’s zipped you through rush-hour traffic to get you to your destination on time, with the meter still relatively low. Or what about a tour guide that took you off the beaten path and showed you the sights no one else ever gets to see? Whenever we have great in-person customer experience, leaving a tip is standard protocol.

So why don’t we show the same appreciation when we experience great service over the phone or via email?

Personal recommendations and referrals are gold in today’s social world. And if you can encourage people to share a good experience they’ve had with your business, it’s going to be great for your brand and bottom line.

There are a few apps, such as Paywithatweet.com, that allows users to pay for goods (such as an eBook) or services, not with cash, but with a tweet.

According to the site:

In today’s world the value of people talking about your product is sometimes higher than the money you would get for it. ‘Pay with a Tweet’ is the first social payment system, where people pay with the value of their social network.

I think this idea could easily be applied to help desks. It might not be conceivable to actually have tweets pay for your organization’s customer support, but it is easy to encourage their positive feedback and gratitude with a post on Twitter or Facebook that mentions your brand.

For instance, you could simply add this to your outgoing help desk emails:

“If you experienced great service from us today we’d appreciate your gratuity.”

You could even suggest to them a prepared tweet such as, “Great service from [@your brand here] today. Really appreciated your time in solving my problem. Cheers”

You could either give the customer your Twitter name or a pre-formatted tweet like the one above. Either way, most people just need to be prompted into action.

You could also encourage your customer support agents to ask callers, “If you enjoyed the service you received today, we’d love to hear about it on Twitter or Facebook, just mention us @yourbrand.” It’s not that much different than asking a customer to complete a survey at the end of their call.

Or, if your company plays customers a recorded message while they are on hold, you could prompt them to tweet or post on Facebook about their experience then as well.

In your Zendesk or Twitter client, create a search to filter out or favorite any “tweets-as-tips” so you can analyze over time how effective tipping with a tweet is for your organization. It’s also a good social barometer to the quality of your service.

Keep us posted on how it goes for you. Hopefully, it starts generating lots more positive buzz about your great service.

Illustration courtesy of Matt Hamm.