In the past few years, Twitter has easily become the fastest growing social platform in the world. It has attracted hundreds of millions of users that are not limited to personal accounts; many businesses and corporations have Twitter accounts for a number of different purposes. If you take a look at Dell’s official Twitter page, you’ll notice that they not only have thousands of followers, but they also have thousands of tweets. These tweets are not exclusively composed of updates and special offers on their products, but the majority of them actually seem to be personalized responses to their customers. It is pretty clear that Dell has dedicated a lot of personnel, time, effort, and focus to their customer engagement through the use of social media.
Dell’s efforts to reach out to their customers and connect with them are definitely not going unnoticed. A personal case study on Dell describes an incident where a Dell customer tweeted a little message about how happy they were with their new Dell product to the company’s Twitter account. The message was not an inquiry or anything that required a response, but to the customer’s surprise, Dell went above and beyond the expectations of customer service. Not only did Dell respond to the customer with a personalized message, a Dell representative created a video thanking the customer for their message, asking questions about which model of product the customer purchased and offering their help and continued support for any further questions or problems. Dell is definitely living by their motto of “The Power To Do More” and the connection created between Dell and the customer through this tweet response has developed an extremely strong, positive, and loyal relationship.
In addition to this engagement with the customer, the representative encourages the tweeter to continue chatting about Dell and spreading the #DellLove among fellow Dell customers. A community of Dell followers and customers has been created through the innovative way that Dell has used a social media platform to not only engage with their customers, but to get their customers engaging with each other. The Dell website goes even further to encourage all customers to follow them on Twitter and join the Dell community. What’s the result? Happy customers who feel appreciated for their loyalty and service. Coming from a customer’s perspective, it’s definitely worth it to put that personnel, time, effort, and focus into customer engagement through social media. After all, the customers are the ones responsible for keeping companies in business.
Lessons For Others:
You can’t always tweet at a company and expect a personalized video response, but even the simple acknowledgement that someone from the company that you’re trying to contact has read your idea, opinion, question or concern makes you feel like a valued customer. When you feel like you’re a valued customer to a company that you’ve purchased a product or service from, you’re more inclined to remain loyal to that company. This is why customer engagement is so vital to companies who want to keep their customers and remain prosperous. Social media make this engagement with customers much easier and convenient than having someone personally respond to thousands of customer emails or phone calls.
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Submitted By: Aryana Heit, SMBP Student, University of Waterloo
To contact the author of this entry please email at: aryanaeheit@gmail.com
If you have concerns as to the accuracy of anything posted on this site please send your concerns to Peter Carr, Programme Director, Social Media for Business Performance.