I recently came across a blog post by Harry Rollason titled, “Customer Service Through Social Media: The game has changed.” Rollason discusses the ways in which social media and the Internet has drastically altered how companies perform customer service.

Social media is not just about maintaining an online presence, or getting the word out about your company. Social media allows you to be responsive to individuals, and show customers that you, and your company are trustworthy, and engaged with them.

Rollason points out that many companies have not yet come to understand how to effectively implement social media into their marketing and customer service plans. He presents these sobering statistics:

• More than 58% of tweeters who have tweeted about a bad experience have never received a response from the offending company
• 55% of consumers expect a response the same day to an online complaint, yet only 29% receive one
• 43% of consumers say that companies should use social media to solve customers’ problems

If you want to perform good customer service, then you have to engage with the customer. In this digital age, social media allows you to do this. Customers are increasingly relying on new methods of communicating like Facebook and Twitter.

At Alexander’s, besides our website and blog, you can find us on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, Pinterest and Foursquare, to name just a few social channels. We’d love it if you’d connect with us, let us know how we are doing, and what we can do to help.

We certainly aim to always perform well, but when mistakes happen, we communicate quickly to make customers happy and prove they’re important to us.