Monitor constantly
It should be common knowledge by now that Twitter and all social media are always on. Conversations are happening at a constant clip, which means you need to be checking in on a regular basis.
Comcast's team takes shifts covering the Twittersphere, maintaining a watchful eye from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. EST. But monitoring social media doesn't necessarily mean you'll have to sit and stare at a computer screen 24 hours a day waiting for something to happen. Sometimes it can mean as little as checking an hour a day.
"Doing it on a daily basis is probably fine for most people," McVey says. "But if you have a time-sensitive business, five minutes every hour for the work day might be better for you."
If your goal is to assist customers, which should be the case with any customer service channel, you need to be prepared to do so quickly. "Direct messages are coming in, and if you're not answering them, that's bad," McVey says. "You don't want to turn people off that way."
Sprint has 48 million customers, but Goldsborough isn't spending every waking hour staring at a screen. When he gets to the office in the morning, he launches his email, opens an internet browser, and then launches TweetDeck, a third-party desktop client that lets users monitor their Twitter feeds, direct messages, and searches. He'll periodically pop into Twitter throughout the day to see what's happening.
"I have trouble sitting down for more than a half hour," he says. "It's almost like I want to take a break for five minutes, so I'll see what the chatter is on there."
With urgent issues, Goldsborough will often devote some time immediately to make sure the problem is resolved quickly. For smaller issues, he'll send a response back to the user and pop back into what he was doing before, waiting for the dialogue to develop so he can help accordingly.
At the same time, it's important not to stretch yourself too thin. Social media's very nature means someone will always be unhappy, and you can only spend so much time trying to please people, according to McVey.
"The ones you want to make sure you fix are where you didn't meet an expectation that was a real expectation," she says. "If you didn't uphold your promise in any way shape or form, you need to do what it takes to uphold it."
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