It is becoming more difficult for companies of all sizes to attract and keep customers as a result of the wide variety of products and services available on the market. Since today's customers want to feel appreciated, delivering exceptional customer service is a proven way to live up to their expectations. Due to social media's undeniable popularity, your social media customer service strategy should include customer support (without a doubt). According to Sprout Social, 57% of customers expect a response on social media within 12 hours. Live software solution, is a place for effective customer-oriented communication that can help you build long-term relationship communication with your customers.
The act of using social media to address customer queries or issues is known as social media customer service. Even though customers can connect with your team on the platforms they already use, social media customer support is extremely effective. The more accessible your support team is to customers, the more likely it is that a negative experience will present an opportunity to delight customers.
It's not surprising that companies are using social media more frequently to enable quick customer service. But how can you go about doing it in a way that actually meets your customers' needs?
Read on, and we'll go over everything you need to know about developing a social media customer service strategy that will help you serve your customers and improve your brand's reputation.
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In order to provide customer support on social media platforms, you must first receive a complaint or question and then work to resolve it. This is known as social media customer support. With a social media customer service strategy, you'll have a team of support agents who are solely responsible for monitoring and responding to social media complaints, queries, and issues.
Social media customer support is quickly emerging as a crucial channel of communication between companies and their customers. Companies can quickly reach out to customers wherever they are, and customers are guaranteed that their requests will not only be delivered but will also be handled as soon as possible.
One of the channels from where your company gains customers and establishes its reputation is through social media customer support. As a result, social media customer service needs a focused strategy. This is so because there are multiple social media platforms and different ways that your customers will use social media. Live solution will help you utilize the power of social for multi-channel messaging for sales, marketing, and support. Automatically capture new leads from social media while enabling seamless support for your customers.
Below, we’ll cover the top 12 social media customer service tips that will help you achieve these goals.
Customer service, as we all know, can make or break a company. Let's examine what it takes to add providing excellent customer service on social media to your skill set.
You should consider your customers' needs and make it simpler for them to ask for assistance when developing a social media customer service strategy. Poor customer service does cost you customers, but you also lose them when you make it difficult for them to get support.
Making things simpler for your customers will be greatly improved by having a single dedicated social media support platform solely for customer service. You will be able to arrange the dispersed customer complaints in this way. With no doubt, you'll be able to respond quickly to customer inquiries from this handle. This makes it clear who to contact for requests related to support.
To contact you for support and service issues, people will still use your primary social media handles. Instead of visiting your main profile to see if there is a support account, they might just use the brand handle they are already familiar with.
Send a support request to the appropriate team and reply from your customers’ support account if one arrives at your primary social media channel.
The second step entails establishing an active brand monitoring system within the social media channels that your customers use to contact you. Utilizing social media tools makes this convenient.
Create custom streams for the brand monitoring tools to find and list posts and comments containing particular words. This enables you to find the most pertinent content quickly.
For instance, you can create a stream for any mention of your brand, whether it is positive or negative.
You can create a content stream with your brand name and a question mark for inquiries. Overall, having multiple streams enables you to segment your customer concerns and give priority to the most pressing ones.
Live platform, allows you to maintain all SLAs from one centralized place that will help you set up and monitor all contracted events and triggers in a way that you’ll never miss anything important.
In comparison to social marketing, social media customer support presents different opportunities and challenges. However, having social media rules in place is still crucial. To ensure brand quality and consistency, your customer service team's social media communicators will follow the brand policies.
You should include the following in your brand's social media customer support policies:
Company guidelines are crucial for distributed teams because they force everyone on the team to set the same KPIs, like the number of conversations per hour or the average time to solve a problem. If brand standards are established and followed within your team, every customer will be able to have a similar experience regardless of which team member is resolving a complaint.
Simply answering is insufficient. Customers anticipate a prompt, polite response when they contact brands on social media. According to Smart Insights, 37% of customers who use social media to complain or question brands expect to get a response in under 30 minutes. Long wait times could mean that customers could start researching competitors.
Having a well-organized system and a team of people who are committed to social media customer service can help you accomplish this. Additionally, you can divide up the team's duties across various social media channels, emphasizing the process for how each issue is looked into and resolved.
Make it clear when you are available for social media customer service. When going offline, let customers know. Provide links to self-help resources. In the meantime, tell them how to contact your call center or other customer support options.
Create a system that centralizes all customer complaints and assigns particular messages to specific team members.
Instead of having to manage multiple social media platforms, this improves the efficiency and speed of resolving customer issues.
Even though you should respond quickly, that doesn't mean you can always resolve all customer problems quickly. Instead of making fictitious promises, be honest with your customers about how long it will take to solve their problems. Even if that means admitting that you don't know how long it will take. According to Inc. study, 94% of all customers are more likely to be loyal to a brand when it commits to full transparency.
If you break a bad promise, your customers will be far more disappointed than they will be patiently waiting. They'll really value your honesty.
Give customers a brief explanation of what you're doing, so they can understand why fixing their problems will take longer. Consider notifying that you'll submit a support ticket to the product team or escalate the problem to a higher level of employees.
Customers will feel more confident in your commitment to helping them with their problems if you are more transparent.
You might consider setting up a social media channel that is completely dedicated to customer support if you find that you are responding to a lot of customer inquiries and complaints on these platforms. A social media customer support channel would greatly enhance your ability to serve customers. A support channel differs from a support team in that the former provides guidance while the latter handles problems.
Direct customers who require assistance to your support profile from your social media pages. For general questions, you can set up a FAQ section, chatbot customer service, or a link to your email and direct message tab.
Each customer has a different preferred customer support channel. Customers will find it easier to select from the various options when there is a support channel.
This will reduce the difficulties customers encounter when submitting a query or tracking them. Customers will also be able to assess previous responses to their inquiries. Above all, having a dedicated social media customer support channel will make it easier to segment your customer service and content marketing efforts on social media.
If you run a large or MSE business, keeping track of every customer interaction might be difficult. You can therefore use our Live platform to control all interactions on social media fully. Additionally, you can use Live chatbot to configure chatbots to handle human-like conversations with your customers for common service requests.
If customers frequently ask the same questions, that's a sign that you should offer some self-service information resources. This will assist you in avoiding similar questions in the future and ensuring customer satisfaction even when your customer support team is not available.
Sharing educational materials on your social media customer service channels is a great idea. For instance, you could write a blog post about best practices or produce a how-to video. It all comes down to teaching customers how to utilize your products to their full potential.
Maintaining a wealthy online resource hub will provide customers with customer service. The volume of support requests would decrease. You can quickly direct your social media customer who has simple inquiries to your online resource center for more details. If you have a proactive strategy on social media customer support, then this will therefore result in higher customer loyalty.
Customers don't anticipate that all companies will provide the same standards of customer service on social media. Due to the fact that the service they use is free or nearly free, some customers do not expect customer service. Customers expect a certain level of customer service if they are paying for your products or services. The expectation of customer service increases with price.
The size of the team available will, of course, influence how companies use social media for customer service.
Setting realistic expectations for your customers is crucial. Give a clear indication of your service team's availability times and the potential response time. Let them know about any additional tools they can use to get answers more quickly.
Even though this rule may seem obvious, not all companies adhere to it. The study shows that 80% of customers use social media to engage with brands. If you don't answer comments, you're neglecting a sizable segment of the market.
Customers may or may not be asking questions about your brand on social media (yet). Responding to all inquiries on social media platforms demonstrates your responsive customer service. This clearly shows potential customers that you are concerned about their needs.
If a potential customer asks for support but doesn't receive it, they'll probably turn to your competitors.
As the number of online purchases increases, it has become usual for customers to contact customer support right away. You might think about using live chats if you want to support your customers and give them a good experience fully.
Making your social media customer service more approachable and available for your customers should be your goal. Your company can switch the social media customer service to live chat rather than having customers and support communicate with each other through posts and tweets on social media.
Live chat offers much more than just a faster and more convenient way for your customers to contact customer service. Live chat increases customer acquisition and onboarding while also enhancing the customer experience and increasing the productivity of your customer service team.
Your team won't feel as much pressure to take every customer complaint call and provide prompt customer service thanks to live chat. The ability to handle multiple issues at once will allow customer service representatives to work on two or more chats at once.
Chatbots can provide customers with the information they need right away. When your team is offline, that is a valuable resource. For common, simple inquiries, bots typically work best.
It's crucial to keep track of the quantity, nature, and, if available, sentiment analysis of your conversations. Tracking frequently occurring comments and feedback, both positive and negative, in a document will help you keep the results of qualitative feedback close at hand.
However, you should also make every effort to quantify your customer service on social media. If you wanted to advocate for more resources to provide customers with even more assistance on these platforms where they are already spending so much time. You could send email customer satisfaction surveys to customers, asking them if they were satisfied with the service they received via social media.
Your efforts can be focused on particular areas that require more attention based on the data you gather and the conclusions you reach. Based on the volume of customer inquiries, you might discover that you require more staff during specific periods compared to other times.
Have you ever thought your team worked on a problem for longer than necessary? In a customer support team, this factor is frequently ignored. When one issue receives more attention than is necessary, other issues can become overlooked.
For a brand to develop the ideal social media customer service strategy, every customer complaint is crucial. You can enhance your product by recognizing the root causes of customer dissatisfaction. Asking for feedback from your customers is an open-ended way to find out what they liked and didn't like about your brand.
Customer feedback enables you to understand what you're doing really well and where you need to make improvements. You must regularly organize and analyze your feedback in order to derive these problems from customer feedback.
You must monitor the metrics that affect social media customer service while you analyze. There are a ton of metrics that matter, but you must identify the ones that have an impact on your brand.
This analysis will assist your customer service team in implementing helpful customer feedback and starting fruitful conversations with your customers.
Utilize the advice above to get the most from your social media customer service right away. Your customers should come first, and following these suggestions will help you do that.
One of the primary channels for customers to contact your company with queries, complaints, and concerns is social media. The best way to respond to and manage this outreach is to have a strategy in place. With the right plan in place, you can create a seamless user experience on your social media profiles that will help you draw in new customers, satisfy old ones, and help your company expand.
Increase customer satisfaction. You'll be happy you looked into our omnichannel platform.
Don't hesitate to get in touch with us today if you want to learn more about how the Live product family can help you support and improve your customer experience strategy.
Learn more about how the Live product family can help you support and improve your customer experience strategy.
