Social media gets the conversation started… and it is a conversation, not just a one-way blast of information.

An overlooked area that you can easily use social media is to improve your company’s customer service. Let’s face the facts – unfortunately, in your business, most unhappy customers will just go elsewhere, not even telling you what went wrong with your service. They just go away. You need to encourage them to comment about your service so that you can fix the problems, improve your delivery and build loyal customers in the process.

Here are 7 easy ways that you can use social media to really wow your customers with stellar customer service while showing potential prospects that you’re on the ball and different than your competitors.

1. Encourage social conversation about your service.

No matter how much we hear about Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn these days, it’s still not necessarily the 1st place on everyone’s mind to complain about poor service from a small business. You’ll need to drive the conversation to happen there. You can do this by any of the following:

1. 1. • Promote your company pages as a place to post comments (good and bad) in all of your communications
      • Put a “How was my service?” note on every service summary and ask them to go there (you’ll gain followers/fans too)
      • Put in your email signature (and your employees too) with a note encouraging comments about your service
      • Encouraging conversation in a public forum demonstrates that you really care and is a very strong statement about your service if positioned properly

2. Set up alerts so that you are notified immediately whenever comments appear.

The speed of response is important. There’s no sense in encouraging comments and then never responding. Bad, bad, bad!

1. • On your Facebook company page, setup alerts to notify you when anyone posts or comments (Edit Page -> Your Settings -> Email Notifications)
   • Setup Twitter alerts via text message to your phone (mobile alerts in Twitter settings) or monitor via Seesmic, TweetDeck, or HootSuite.
   • The same applies to all of the other social media platforms that your company is active on. Reputation management is crucial to the success of your business’s online presence.

3. Monitor comments that are made (solicited or not).

Respond QUICKLY to all comments. Be fair and don’t overreact to negative comments about your service. Remember that this is a public forum and your response speaks volumes about your company. What you say may make or break your relationship with this customer and new prospects too.

4. Engage as a personality… not as a corporate entity.

You’re a small business, not a Fortune 100 company. People work with you for that personal touch. Take advantage of this. The “big guys” can’t touch this. Everyone knows that people screw up every once in a while. Wow them with how you personally respond as the owner of the company!

5. Practice “damage control” when necessary.

Marsha Collier, author of The Ultimate Online Customer ServiceGuide encourages you to approach negative conversations “with honesty and a willingness to make amends if needed” rather than shutting down these conversations. Own up to mistakes and let the audience know about how you made things right for the customer. Speed of response is a big key here as well – shows others how quickly you respond to anything.

Setup your alerts, provide a forum for feedback and encourage your customers to interact. You may just be surprised with the results you achieve.