Working with your HOA

Before you do any construction on the exterior of your home, check with your Home Owner's Association. Associations are in place to make sure your property value remains high by disallowing mailboxes shaped like giant fish, houses pained 6 shades of neon, and an abundance of trash in the neighbor's yard. However, they may have strict rules as to what type of paint you can use, how many shades lighter your trim can be, what material you need to use on your roof, or the height of your shed or fence. Before you have to undo or redo work on your home, check with your HOA first and get the information in writing.

Friendly Customer Service

We pride ourselves on professional service, but also friendly customer service. You will do business with, and refer to your friends, those you like. We want you to like us, to respect us, and to count on us to get the job done right.

If you feel this is an important characteristic for your business as well, you might like these tips from 1-to-1 Media on how to deliver friendly responses in your social media arenas:

Be yourself

To be successful in social, you need to use a human tone of voice. Avoid corporate speak.

But...be conscious of syntax
It's challenging to convey tone and empathy in 140 characters, and multiple tweets can be taken out of context. Think about when should you link to a longer blog posts or separate article, or need to switch to email or other media to convey more information.

Keep the conversation online where possible
Everything that can be kept on public social networks should be. This is not only where the customer reached out to you, but it also allows you to show the rest of the world that you resolved the issue, boosting your public image. If any part of the conversation must go offline, try to take it back as soon as possible.

Remember that everything can be public
Be aware of what's default public and private (for example the difference between @messages and DMs). But more important, taking something "offline" now doesn't mean it will be private. In social media, anything private can quickly get posted publicly online.

Respond promptly and accurately
People expect a quick response in social. Comcast, for example, aims to get a first response to everyone within two to five minutes. But, it's better to be slower and accurate than to go too fast and say something wrong that can be spread very quickly.

Becoming social savvy takes time, training, and good management. Despite some industry leaders delivering great social-based service to their customers, for most, mastering the challenge is a work in progress. Conversocial conducted research into the performance of top retailers, finding that, on average, 65 percent of complaints and questions on Facebook were missed. There's a long way for businesses to go before they master social customer service, but following these examples should help many companies along the way.