Customer service and social media go hand-in-hand. Customers will ask questions and report issues anywhere that they can contact a company, and social media is often the tool closest at hand.

But when you have a separate team handling social media, problems can sometimes occur. The most common? “GUYS, you need to answer this person on Twitter RIGHT NOW, they’re REALLY mad.”

Cue the collective sighs of the support team. They have dozens of other support tickets to deal with. Why is this one any different?

Don’t let a rift build between these two crucial customer-facing teams. Instead, try these 5 tips for getting them to work in harmony:

1. Know what users actually expect

Only 30% of consumers expect a response within 30 minutes on Twitter – 23% expect an answer within 2 hours and another 30% only expect a response within a day*. [Tweet this] So yes, you do need to respond the same day – but most folks don’t expect you to respond immediately. (In any case, our data suggests you should be trying to respond to messages from any channel within an hour).

2. Walk a mile in each other's shoes

Lack of context is one of the biggest causes of miscommunications. Have your social team spend at least a day in the regular support queue, so they can get a sense of the volume and the effort required. Likewise, have your support team spend time on social, so they can grasp the immediacy of the channel. A little understanding will go a long way here.

3. Have an official method of routing social support items

Often the problem can just be the communication methods. Sending a chat or email (or even worse, coming to bug them in person) to the support team can be a costly interruption. Set up a way to route support-related social messages directly into your existing support tool and process (like the integration between Sprout Social and UserVoice).

4. Respond quickly (even if you don’t solve quickly)

Customers just want to know that you care and are going to solve their problem. [Tweet this] If you can’t get to their issue right away, have your team respond to them and let them know that you will be looking into it soon. (For the extra-frustrated folks, try letting them know how many tickets were already in the queue before them). That’s way better than radio silence.

5. Sometimes, you do have to prioritize social

But finally, sometimes social media does demand focus. If someone has huge reach – say, the editor of the New York Times – then their frustration will cause more damage than those ahead of them in your support queue. If someone is accusing you of something horrendous on Twitter, you may want to look into that before it starts a wildfire of gossip. Don’t bend over backwards just because someone has a thousand Twitter followers, but be aware of when to prioritize.

Social media and support are different, but with some process and understanding, both teams can work together to delight customers.

*http://www.oracle.com/us/products/applications/commerce/live-help-on-demand/oracle-live-help-wp-aamf-1624138.pdf (page 7)

At the last Customer Service Breakfast we discussed knowledge bases & documentation. I got a bit jealous as one breakfaster told us that she has a full-time employee focusing on documentation. Most folks attending breakfast had someone doing documentation part-time while also answering support tickets, and that can make your documentation suffer. Not all of us can have a documentation-only hire, but there’s some good lessons to be learned from the full-time documenters.

1. Have a singular voice

It’s important that your knowledge base have a consistent voice. Imagine how confused a customer would be if you referred to a “widget” in one article and a “plugin” in another. This doesn’t have to mean a single person writing your articles…but if it’s not, you need a style guide and set of nomenclature. Get your style and language consistent and your customers will better be able to find answers.

2. Images are worth the time

People are very visual, and glaze over when they see a wall of text. Taking the time to include images in your articles will make them significantly more effective. If you can’t have a full-timer making these, then make sure to give all members of the team time to go that extra mile when writing articles. (Want to embed photos in UserVoice Knowledge Base articles? Find out how here.)

3. Update documentation when you update your product

Worse than not having a knowledge base article for a topic is having one that’s inaccurate. Especially in the era of quickly-iterated software as a service, it’s incredibly likely that articles you write will fast become out of date (especially ones with images). Rather than try to catch these when someone complains, you should assign someone to investigate which articles need to be updated when your product is changed. Yes, this will take a bit of time…but in the end, it’ll save you time because customers won’t be asking you questions about inaccurate articles.

4. Inter-link your articles

Bite-sized articles are great for our attention-deficit age, but there’s often more to a story. When someone is reading about customizing one part of your app, they may want to know about what other customizations they can do. Linking to related articles means your customers can learn more without having to look harder…or email you. With one person writing articles, they can easily delve into their mental database to figure out what related articles should be linked to. If you don’t have a single person writing your documentation, try having team members run new articles by the whole team so they can all suggest related articles.

5. You’re not a bad person…

…if you don’t have a full-time documentation hire. In fact, some breakfast attendees said it was useful to cycle different people into documentation to provide a broader set of insights and avoid burnout. If that’s your situation, just make sure your team abides by the tips above and you can have a functional and effective knowledge base.

This tip comes from a great discussion at one of our Customer Service Breakfasts. (Come join us for the next one!)

One of the bigger challenges for support teams – especially managers – is prioritizing and triaging support tickets in your queue. Does this old ticket beat out a newer but more urgent one? Is this issue actually urgent? Where do you even start?

Psychologists believe that our brains process things in the background while we focus on other subjects. It’s the exact reason why sometimes focusing on a problem doesn’t actually provide you with an answer…the answer comes to you later when you’re showering or air guitar-soloing to Queens of the Stone Age.

How can you harness this? Try this: take a look at your support queue before you actually dive into it. Before you take your morning shower, have your breakfast or start your commute just take a glance. Get a sense of what’s in there. Then leave it.

Let your brain subconsciously prioritize, and then later return to your queue when you finish your morning rituals. With any luck your brain will have already started to figure out how to handle the tickets, and you won’t have to think quite so hard.

We love this concept, and have been playing with it ourselves. Give it a try, and let us know if it works for you!

Photo via Bigstock.

What holds a country together? What makes a family more than just genetics? What ensures a farmer’s son doesn’t kill all the crops when he takes over the farm? Stories. We all tell stories to reinforce our heritage and remember the lessons our predecessors learned. These stories inspire and inform us in a way that pure instructions cannot.

Entrepreneurship and invention is full of stories. “Zuck” making it big by hacking first, asking questions later. Jobs never settling for adequate. Jack Dorsey’s intense schedule and limited sleep.

We don’t have enough of these stories in the customer space. We focus on doing our job, as I mentioned last week. We try to do good work and we don’t take enough credit for it. The problem is, we’re not learning if we’re not sharing.

Stories originated before we had text or printing presses or language. Petroglyphs carved into rocks may have communicated emotional concepts like a big hunt as well as practical knowledge like maps. This art, these stories, engaged these people and helped them gather and retain knowledge. Life improved, generation after generation, because we could build on past knowledge and stories and add to that cave wall.

I think those in the service community can do better than Paleolithic cultures.

People share best practices occasionally, but these are questionable and forgettable without the context of a story. But there are a few stories out there. Zappos’s stories get repeated until we’re sick of them, but (as I’ve said before) that’s why they’re so effective as learning tools (and good press). That’s why we put these stories (and these customer service heroes) on stage at UserConf.

Let’s keep up the trend. We have the opportunity to make our craft even more effective, efficient, and valuable. We have the opportunity to build more company support for our departments, bigger salaries for the customer service reps doing great work, and happier customers.

Share your stories. Email your staff or set up an internal blog and share great instances of support. Post them in the comments here. Tweet them to us. Blog them. Share them at our Customer Service Breakfasts.

You all have a lot to share…don’t let it go to waste!

Photo courtesy of Frank Kehren.

The emoticon just turned 30, and it doesn’t look a day over 25.

But in all seriousness, the emoticon is a powerful tool. Created by scientists to delineate the difference between a theoretical joke and an actual safety-hazard situation, the emoticon has become the best way to get over the challenges of communicating on the internet.

Emoticons are the new body language

“55 percent of the meaning in any message comes from the visual body language,” says James Borg, author of Body Language: 7 Easy Lessons to Master the Silent Language (pg 17). When you think about all the little movements we make during conversation, this makes sense…as does the excruciating number of awkward, misinterpreted messages on the internet (“I don’t care where we eat dinner.” “Why are you so mad?!”).

An emoticon, however, can make an amazing difference in textual communication, especially in customer service. It’s just as, if not more, powerful than body language. Users approach customer service with trepidation; they’ve had terrible experiences with other companies, and they expect to have them again. When you say something factual, they can interpret this – with that prior expectation – as negative or uncaring. A at the end of a sentence tells you very clearly that the customer service rep they're speaking to is feeling positive or being cheeky. “I wish I could get our team to build that, too” goes from unpleasant pessimism to empathetic understanding with “I wish I could get our team to build that, too ”.

Proof is in the data

When looking at the customer support tickets we responded to in 2012 so far, 9.6% of responses including emoticons got Kudos from customers, while only 5.2% of emoticon-less ticket responses got Kudos. That’s 84.6% more Kudos when you use an emoticon.

Some people think emoticons are stupid or unprofessional, but the fact of the matter is: nobody will get mad if you use one…but plenty of people may get mad if they think you’re being cranky with them (when you’re really not). We're just fine overusing emoticons if it makes our communication clearer and users happier. Happy birthday, emoticons, and thanks!

Photo courtesy of Thomas Gegenhuber.

While we're devoting 95% of our energy towards our upcoming conference, UserConf, there's a little part of our brain buzzing with excitement for the week after. Why? Because that's when Twiliocon is.

We've been fans of Twilio for a while. Partially because they make awesome voice and messaging APIs which make it really easy for companies to set up sales or support phone systems. But partially it's just that Twilio has amazing style and great people. Every interaction we've had with them has been great, and we can't wait to see what they do at their conference…which includes Twilio product workshops, sessions about communications tech, business solutions and customer experience, a hackathon, and of course the requisite giant afterparty.

If you're thinking about building out your call center – or just obsessed with customer experience – we recommend giving Twiliocon a look.

Our very own account manager Danny Bloomfield will be attending, so drop him a line if you'll be there!

If you follow us anywhere on the internet you probably know by now that we're hosting UserConf, the first customer service-centric conference dedicated to helping you keep your customers happy. You also probably know that it will be hosted at the Fort Mason center in San Francisco on October 12th. So I could go on and on about how many amazing speakers we have and go over all the awesome stuff you'll learn, but today I'm here to show you how beautiful our venue is. Let's get started:

What at first appears to be any old industrial pier…

…is actually a beautifully urban conference center inside where some people give ostrich presentations!

You'll get amazing views of the Golden Gate Bridge…

…and of downtown from the beautiful lawn.

In closing, this place is so sweet that you can arrive via floating vessel…

…or bring your own robo-fighting machine. (Note: robo-fighting machines not sanctioned by UserVoice.)

So now you know that the venue in and of itself is a dream getaway (that also hosts robot fighting tournaments)! To see a list of all our speakers, topics, and buy tickets head on over to UserConf.co - We can't wait to see you at Fort Mason!

Fort Mason Center photo courtesy of stevendamron.
Ostrich photo by Noah Sussman
Bridge photo by McCanon
Park photo by afagen
Boat photo by flippinyank
Robot photo by Dave Shumaker