Around this time last year I posted about Embracing the Online Anger, and one of the topics I’ve been meaning to explore further was how to handle customer service issues on Twitter. The recent good news on that front is that Twitter itself has made it easier to transition a customer to using Direct Messages (DMs) to interact with you, rather than corresponding via a public conversation.
There are a few good reasons to go private:
- personal information from the patron may be required to resolve the issue
- direct messages have a much higher character limit
- dirty laundry isn’t aired in public
Also, can we agree that it just doesn’t cut it anymore to tell the patron to call your box office for assistance? If a patron initiates contact via Twitter, you should have a process in place to resolve their issue as best you can within their preferred method of contact.
So, what is this new functionality?
According to Twitter’s blog post on February 18th, “a business can now add a deep link to their Tweets that automatically displays a call to action button, which allows the customer to send the business a Direct Message, quickly and easily.”
You’ll need to do these three steps before implementing:
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1) Make sure you can receive DMs from everyone
This setting is found under Settings > Security and Privacy, near the bottom of the page.
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2) Find your Twitter Numeric User ID
This is not your user name, but a unique number assigned to your account. This isn’t as obvious to find as you might think; I found the easiest way to get this information was via www.idfromuser.com.
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3) Create the deep link
The link you paste into your tweet should look like this: https://twitter.com/messages/compose?recipient_id={your account’s numeric user ID}
(Note: your numeric ID replaces everything after =, including the curly brackets)
Now your customer can easily click on the special call to action that is created to continue the conversation.
You can find the official resource for this functionality on Twitter’s help site.
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And now a question for readers:
Does your organization give any customer service reps access to your Twitter account, or is it solely handled within the marketing and communications department? Let us know in the comments!