by Erin Mitchell
This week I had a horrid customer service experience. I’ll spare you the gory details, but it got me thinking about the importance of customer service as a marketing tactic for authors.
For the purposes of this discussion, the customers you’re serving are readers.
I remember the first time I sent an email to an author and she wrote back to me. It was like all my birthdays had come at once. I was really fangirl gushy excited. I already liked the author’s work and would have kept reading it anyhow, but this gave me a mission I maintain to this day, namely to make sure I am personally responsible for introducing as many people as possible to her books.
Most of us are accustomed to sending emails to info@ or contact@ customer service addresses and getting back just a form letter, if we’re lucky. So that’s pretty much what readers expect when they write to authors, whether via email, Facebook, or Twitter, and whether their message contains a compliment or criticism. But authors aren’t corporate machines (right?!?) and so behaving like one shouldn’t be necessary.
Authors tend to get quite a lot of communication, and so maintaining a personal level of communication—customer service—with every single correspondent might be difficult. But there are some things you can do to excel at reader-focused customer service.
1. Monitor communication
Whether you do this yourself or get help (see below), make sure someone is reading inbound message via all the channels you use. This monitoring should happen in as close to real time as you can manage, but certainly not less than every-other-daily.
2. Remember that not all communication is created equal
If someone has obviously invested a great deal of energy in sending you a complimentary message, a short “thank you” response is warranted. If, however, a reader has sent a diatribe on some niggly book detail he feels you got wrong, you can choose not to engage with him. Likewise, you don’t need to follow every single Twitterer who @ mentions you.
3. Mass communication is just fine sometimes
If you get a lot of communication about a particular topic via Facebook posts on your fan page, it’s OK to do one post that addresses them all. Take a look at James Lee Burke’s page; he responds to topics, rather than individual posts, and it works beautifully. Or, if you’re getting messages via multiple venues, you can always write a blog post to address them and share the link.
4. Whatever happens, step away from the flames
There is no reason—none, ever—to get involved in a flame war. Know when to say nothing.
5. Having someone help with customer service is not disingenuous
Publicity, marketing and PR are all about communication. And if you have someone helping you with any of these, there is nothing whatsoever wrong with getting that person to help respond to communication from readers, even if it’s just to sort and help you prioritize.
