Jun 29, 2010
AnswerFirst Taps Twitter for Client Interaction
First they went to Facebook, then YouTube—and now Twitter.
AnswerFirst Communications, a virtual receptionist, answering and messaging services firm headquartered in Tampa, Fla., has launched a Twitter account to interact with customers. AnswerFirst is tweeting status updates, special promotions, general business tips and other information to its followers. Twitter has more than 80 million users at the time of this writing.
Wait, What’s Twitter?
In case you’ve been living under a rock, Twitter is a real-time information network powered by people all around the world that lets you share and discover what’s happening right now.
From a business perspective, Twitter helps organizations of all sizes stay connected to their customers. AnswerFirst is using it to keep customers in the known about its virtual receptionist service.
Companies like Dell have generated millions of dollars in additional revenue from running promotions on Twitter. And Coca-Cola just launched a Promoted Tweet campaign to congratulate the England and U.S. soccer teams. The ad saw 86 million impressions in 24 hours. AnswerFirst isn’t aspiring to Dell- or Coke-like results. The company is just striving to better serve its customers.
Real-Time Communications
Jim Smith, AnswerFirst’s director of Inside Sales, called Twitter a simple yet powerful channel of communication between the company and its clients. Twitter, he says, is easy to use and easily accessible, and the real-time broadcast format is robust.
“If one of our Internet service providers goes down, then we can still update our Twitter account via a mobile phone. This feature allows our IT department to keep our customers informed during transitions or outages,” Smith says.
AnswerFirst has also used its Twitter account to announce breaking news, new services and special promotional rates. Since the majority of AnswerFirst’s client-base consists of business owners or management, the company also tweets business and marketing tips. Smith sees it as a differentiator between AnswerFirst and other virtual receptionist companies.
“We have a lot of remote operators who rely on our infrastructure to do their jobs. We use internal chat and e-mail for communicating with these employees but, we’ve been able to use Twitter for further redundancy and for last minute announcements about network performance or changes,” says James Cass, Director of IT at AnswerFirst. Our employees have found that checking our twitter account is easier and faster than making a phone call.”
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