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An old saying goes: The customer is always right. These days, the customer expects top-quality customer service from the companies they do business with. Given the current crisis, the one thing that matters the most right now is brilliant customer service.
You must ensure you are not only communicating but also resolving their problems and objections in the best way possible. This means being present on the platforms where they’re actively having a discussion.
One of the most effective ways of accomplishing this task is – customer service on social media. It’s most likely that your customer is present on a social network because 45 percent of the world population is already using social media.
Use social media not just to share content but also to better your customers. Here are several ways you can use social customer service to provide a great experience to your clientele:
1. Reply within minutes
42 percent of your customers expect a response from your company within an hour of contact. Quick responses build up your credibility, aids in branding, and growing customer loyalty.
In fact, if you can find a way to be present online for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, it will quickly build customer loyalty. If 24/7 is not possible, being there for 12-hour windows during working hours is the next best thing.
To facilitate quicker responses to queries, consider creating dedicated social media handles for customer service and support. Your customers can directly contact help support to resolve their specific issues.
It’s advisable to integrate a chatbot on your website that allows social media logins and automatically initiates a conversation with visitors. You can even automate some of the conversations that happen frequently. For complex issues, clients can always contact customer service reps.
2. Delight your customers
Customer service is not just about resolving a customer’s problem. Interaction with customers reveals valuable information that may play a vital role into product innovation and development. One of the ways you can implement this is through branded short links.
While most other brands share cryptic links such as bit.ly/rtt&t to redirect their customers to another page, you can make this communication more meaningful by sharing branded and meaningful links such as theleather.store/hangbags.
The difference between the two links is that the latter link communicates something to your user about the website they will land on, whereas the former can point anywhere. New domain extensions such as .TECH, .STORE, .ONLINE, .SITE, .SPACE, .UNO etc allow you to build keyword-rich meaningful short links for social media. All you need to do is sign-up for a link-shortening service and you’re good to go.
3. Learn from the past
Social media is an excellent tool for growing your audience, but it’s also essential for helping to understand your audience. Social media sites store users’ information that can be accessed through analytics.
The information can be related to their demographics, interests, buying behaviors, travels, and more. Your customer service department can utilize this information to personalize their conversations. It will help in better engagement, eventually resulting in better sales conversions.
Perhaps, you have had a previous social customer service campaign that didn’t perform very well. Social media can be used to learn why that happened and what you can work on for future campaigns.
4. Audit your social media accounts
Your business’s presence on various social media platforms is obligatory. Your customers hang out on different networks. Therefore, you have to analyze where maximum engagement is happening. It will allow you to address their queries in the best way.
For example, if people mostly interact with your content on Facebook and Instagram, you must set up a customer service channel on these social media networks. It will help improve your response rate and will also enhance your customer experience.
To register complaints, users often tweet on Twitter because they expect a quick redressal of their grievances. Similarly, for reviewing products and services, customers prefer posting on Instagram and Facebook.
Your customer service team must be ready to tackle customer problems and queries on the most popular social media networks. Have a look at the audience’s behavior, past interactions, and other metrics to identify the most appropriate social media platform for customer service.
5. Choose whether to respond publicly or privately
This is a significant aspect of customer service. The complaints and comments that you receive should be dealt with in one of the two ways – respond publicly or respond privately.
You’ll want to respond publicly to any type of praise or generic question that can be answered in a few words. The public response will also help other customers, and it will also enhance your credibility.
In the case of a customer complaint, you could acknowledge the concern publicly and ask them to message you privately or tell them a customer service rep will get in touch with them shortly. That way, it doesn’t appear to other customers that you’ve chosen to ignore the complaint.
Then, there are comments that neither represent a genuine issue nor add any value. Depending on the nature of the comment, you can take a call on whether to address it or ignore it.
Knowing the difference between when to respond publicly and when to respond privately is key. It helps you deliver proper attention to each interaction that you have with your prospects and clients. For social listening and customer service management, you can opt for social media automation tools such as Hootsuite and Buffer.
Optimize social customer service starting today
Now that you’ve seen all the different ways you can up your social customer service game, it’s time to put your plan into action. Besides facilitating seamless customer experience, social customer service will also help you in online reputation management. And if people know that your company values customers’ sentiments, they will be willing to do business with you.