Twitter: A New Way to Serve Students

What methods do you use to answer students' questions? Chance are that Twitter never crossed your mind. You most likely would have thought about answering questions over the phone, through email or face-to-face in your office. 

Twitter provides a new forum in which to find and answer questions from students. A growing number of organizations are leveraging Twitter to provide customer service. For instance Jet Blue Airways, Dell Computer (Canada) and recently the City of Toronto's 311 service have all incorporated Twitter into their service strategy.  You can follow @JetBlue, @DellHomeSalesCA and @311Toronto to see how Twitter is being used by these three organizations.  You can find more case studies on the Twitter 101 website. 

As a way to help students at Ryerson the staff at the Student Services Front Desk have added @AskMeRU to their tool box of customer service options.  To enhance the service they provide the staff are searching for comments, questions and problems on Twitter by following tweets that contain "Ryerson" or "#Ryerson" in the text. In many cases this allows the staff to proactively address concerns that are posted on Twitter.  The staff use HootSuite to monitor comments made on Twitter.

To find out more all you have to do is follow the groups above on Twitter. If your school or department uses Twitter to serve students please share your @username so others can learn from you.