How ClassPass does customer service replies

By Sandra Vega
Inspiration

People come to Twitter to follow and interact with their favorite brands. In fact, when consumers don’t get an answer from a company on Twitter, 81% don’t recommend that company to their friends*. This means your brand is losing when a customer's Tweet goes unanswered.

Brands can't afford to build a social media strategy without including tactics for replying to customers on Twitter. That's why we chatted with @classpass, a fitness membership, to share how they approach customer service replies. 

Introduce yourself

Hi! My name is Cara Friedman, and I am the Director of Community at ClassPass. ClassPass is a monthly membership that gives you access to fitness classes in your city. The community team at ClassPass manages, you guessed it, the community members — both online and offline.

ClassPass is very active with replies on Twitter. What is your strategy for replying to customers on Twitter?

Twitter is a great vehicle for us to engage with our community in a fast and concise way. We respond to all Tweets sent our way, whether it’s a question, a customer service issue, a comment, a suggestion, or a milestone.

We’re also actively listening for conversations about ClassPass (whether as a mention or not) that we can join in on. We often find people mentioning ClassPass without including our handle, so we make it a point to respond to those Tweets as well.

How do you make sure customer needs are met?

Our goal for every interaction is to make sure we are answering the question people are asking. We don’t copy and paste replies or pull answers from an FAQ kit. We read every Tweet that comes in, and we do our best to provide the best answer.

Sometime’s it’s challenging to stay within the character limit, but it also helps us focus in on the question at hand and meet our customers' needs.

People like to feel as if they’re interacting with a real person online. How does ClassPass approach customer replies that feel human?

Every response is typed out and sent by a real person. Even if we’re asked the same question multiple times. If space permits, we always try to use a person’s name in the Tweet so they know that this was written just for them and didn’t come from a template.

How do you approach Direct Messages?

Direct Messages are a great tool. We want to be able to solve a customer’s problem as quickly as possible. With a Direct Message, we have more characters to work with and we can discuss more sensitive account information that we wouldn’t want to be Tweeting publicly.

We often need a customer’s email address to assist, and Direct Messages help us protect the privacy of our members.

Have you noticed an improvement in customer satisfaction by having a customer service approach on Twitter?

We get lots of positive feedback daily! Our community members know that if they need a quick response, they can head to Twitter or another social network to get that. We do our best to be staffed for as many time zones as possible and try to keep response times low.

What should brands keep in mind when forming their own customer service strategy on Twitter?

Managing your Twitter account and responding to customers doesn’t always happen within the same team. Sometimes it is managed by the customer service team, the marketing team, or both!

This cross-functional collaboration and constant communication is key to a successful customer service strategy on Twitter. Both teams in our organization work seamlessly together with the same goal in mind — satisfy the customer!

Anything additional to add?

Twitter has not only been an effective customer service channel for us, but it has also been great for collecting product feedback. The kind of content our members share as well as the moments and milestones they care about help inform how we improve our product.

We often get direct feedback from members with suggestions on what studios to add, or what city to launch in, or even what features to add to the app. We value this feedback and want to learn from it!

All of the feedback is collected and delivered back to the right teams so we can execute on these.

How does your business do customer service replies? Let us know @TwitterBusiness.

Source: Twitter Customer Insight Survey, 2015

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