This Zengage Special Feature is authored by Dave Olson, Community Director at HootSuite.

Customer Conversation & Support

The line between customer relationship management, technical support, and promotional campaigns is blurring. No longer is one silo for support adequate as customers expect interactions across multiple channels — including questions posed within Twitter. This situation presents great opportunity to build brand awareness and affinity but also offers a potential human resource conundrum and workflow problem to ensure everyone receives a quality follow-up without playing Whac a Mole with manic managing and scattered tracking of questions and replies.

With Zendesk’s fresh social integration, messages from Twitter can become trackable “twickets” which ensure everyone gets a response from their desired channel while also keeping your customers support team focused on providing quality answers rather than chasing down ephemeral tweets.

More than 140

At HootSuite, we actively monitor several Twitter accounts for compliments (hurrah!) as well as inquiries and conundrums which require follow-up. Within HootSuite, you can assign Twitter messages to teammates which is adequate when a response fits in 140 characters — but that only fits a few words and a link pointing to a Help Desk article.

More often, the answer requires a bit of investigation plus requires tracking to ensure an accurate follow up and reporting. With Zendesk’s creative use of the Twitter “favorite” setting you can create Twitter tickets or “twickets” with a few clicks directly from the HootSuite dashboard (or Twitter web for that matter).

So now, when we find a Twitter message needing some attention, we simply choose the new option to “push to Zendesk” then choose which account to assign it to, and whazam, you’ve created a trackable ticket … errr… twicket, in Zendesk.

Go with the Flow

For busy support teams, maintaining a simple workflow is of paramount importance to ensure no problems slip through the cracks (and no one gets over-whelmed). Additionally, some conundrums require a little help from colleagues. By moving the inquiry from Twitter to Zendesk, we can consult with our developer teammates and share notes and ideas internally within Zendesk before resolving the issue with a response to the customer.

Once created in Zendesk, the conversation is persistent, archived and ready for answering using pre-defined macro messages and other ready-made resources. Additionally, all customer support touch points are available for one-stop reporting using Zendesk’s built-in ticket tracking chart just like the tickets created by email or on web.

Example: With the recent HootSuite 5 launch, there was some confusion about the Re-tweet style choices between “old-school” and “Twitter native” style — by moving the Twitter messages into Zendesk twickets, we were able to track the requests, and respond efficiently with a macro without flooding the Twitter stream with redundant messages.

Happy Campers

Indeed, creating positive service interactions in a timely and accurate manner results in more happy customers and staff. In the past, when a question posed via Twitter required a longer answer, we’d either ask the customer to submit a ticket to the HootSuite Help Desk, or we’d create a ticket ourselves by copying and pasting. But those days are behind us! Now, just like forwarding by email to create a ticket, social inquires are logged and centralized.

The real winners with this scenario are your end users who will be amazed with the speed and accuracy of responses (or they should be anyhow ). Plus, customer support teams can resolve problems with fewer clicks and fewer screens which prevents frustration and burn-out.

Zen Owl

Start making “twickets” of your own by signing up for accounts at HootSuite and Zendesk. Then begin monitoring Twitter conversations about your brand, product and industry, along with your usual reply channels. When you see a candidate for help, submit any message directly into your pre-configured Zendesk account for centralized followup. Easy.

Pro Tip: Be sure to monitor Twitter for common misspellings of your brand or product names. In our case, we monitor variations of HootSuite including “Hoot Sweet” “HoootSuite” and “Hoote Suit” (really). Chances are you’ll find threads of people calling out for help which gives you a chance to be a hero with some quick hand-holding to get them up to speed. Want even more happy campers? Track Twitter mentions of your competitors to assist and convert disgruntled customers.

With Zendesk, Twitter and HootSuite, you now have a seamless recipe to increase response velocity while also improving quality. That will put any owl in a state of satori.

Author:

Dave Olson is Community Director at HootSuite and oversees support channels and outreach campaigns. He publishes voraciously around the social web and enjoys soaking in hot springs and wandering in the forest spotting owls.