Ever since its introduction more than a decade ago, social media has become a vital customer support channel for businesses. But are you using it to the fullest? Let’s explore the ways how you can better take advantage of social media for customer service.
Why Social Media is Great for Customer Service
Before using social media for customer service, it would be a good idea to look back at the reasons why you would want to do so. This will help you better appreciate this communication channel and better plan out your strategies for it.
Being where your customers are is the biggest reason why you would want to be here. Facebook alone has over 2.6 billion active users, while other platforms have user numbers in the hundreds of millions. With the number of users on these platforms, you can find people who are part of your desired audience almost immediately.
This also makes social media a great place for listening to what customers are saying. They even willingly give their opinions on various platforms, giving an unadulterated look at what they think about your brand.
Responding to Customer Concerns
Since communication on social media happens in near real-time, you get to respond to your customers’ concerns faster. This is especially helpful in customer support, as people would want to have their problems solved in just a few hours. That response speed will help you build a better image in their eyes.
Additionally, social media provides you with a channel to constantly engage with your audience. You can interact with them through different gimmicks like contests and giveaways. You could even simply chat about any topic while assisting them. All of these help you build a closer relationship with your customers.
The Challenges of Customer Service on Social Media
While the above are solid reasons for building your presence on social media, it is not without its challenges. These will significantly affect how you effectively use social media for customer service. As such, you would want to build a comprehensive plan that will address these challenges.
The first challenge that you will encounter here is, ironically enough, keeping up with the demand for service. Since social media makes reaching out to brands a lot easier, the number of comments and messages directed towards you can grow quickly in a short amount of time. And people expect you to respond within a few hours, which is often a daunting task.
Figuring Out Customer Intent
Another challenge of doing customer service on social media is understanding the intent of your audience. Companies can often have a hard time determining who exactly they should speak to on different platforms. They might also have a hard time determining how to properly speak to this audience.
This is aggravated by companies focusing only on broadcasting their messages. Here, they need to understand that social media is not about that. Rather, it should be about interaction with the audience and the generation of feedback between you and them.
Integrating Social Channels
Doing customer support on social media can be radically different from traditional methods like call centers. As such, you would want to make sure that the people who are well-versed on social media to properly handle the messages coming from customers. On the other hand, you need to seamlessly integrate it with other customer service methods to make the transfer of concerns faster.
Improving on How You Use Social Media for Customer Service
To improve your use of social media for customer service, the first thing to do is be on the right platforms. Often, companies would be on too many platforms to be more visible. What this ends up doing is spreading yourself thin, which makes it harder to respond to customers.
While it might sound cliche, the best platforms to be in is where most of your customers can be found. Note that these might not always be the popular ones like Facebook or Twitter. By surveying your customers, you can easily determine their social media preferences. This is also a great way to show that you are ready to listen since you go out to where they are.
Acting Human
Another common advice on using social media for customer service is to act human. But how does your team do that if they are representing a brand? One useful trick here is to kill the script.
Often, social media handlers would rely on pre-determined scripts when responding to customer questions. While this helps when dealing with common questions, it can make them feel unwelcoming to the audience. People expect to connect with other people on the platform and they won’t get that when listening to a preset script.
Here, you would want to give your customer service agents more freedom in how they would respond to customer questions. Let them converse with people more naturally to better engage the latter. Telecommunications giant TMobile is well known for this strategy when handling customer complaints.
Even if you are using automation like chatbots, you would still want to make sure that these feel human. Advances on AI technology have now made it easier for chatbots to converse similar to humans, so you would want to take advantage of these. Also, keep in mind that these chatbots are just there to fill the gaps. You should always have an agent ready to take over the conversation if requested by the customer.
Social Media Engagement Done Right
As have been said before, speed plays a significant role when using social media for customer service. Around 42% of users expect that you will respond to their questions within an hour. This is where chatbots will be useful, as it will let your team keep answering questions even outside of regular office hours.
Meanwhile, your human agents need to know which tone to use when engaging with audiences on social media. Some useful cues are:
- Emoticons: People using emoticons when communicating with you indicate that they are conversing informally. This means you can also use the same lighthearted tone.
- Language fluency: If the person reaching out to you on social media isn\’t that fluent in your chosen language, you need to match their level of fluency and choose simpler words.
- Seriousness: If you think that the customer is already sounding frustrated on social media, be more empathic towards them. This is particularly important when handling complaints.
By knowing what tone to use for each customer on social media, you can effectively tailor your engagements to them. This level of personalization draws people to your brand more effectively.
Moving from Public to Private
One important thing your team needs to understand when using social media for customer service is that not everything should be resolved on it. There are instances where your customer would want to talk about matters privately. As such, you should make that transition easy.
When doing this, maintain the same friendly tone that you have used. This assures customers that you are empathizing with their situation and handing them over to people who can help. You also need to make sure to follow up on their situation after the handover.
Additionally, be more proactive when taking conversations from social media to other channels. Come up with guidelines that will determine which kinds of social media engagements you can respond to in public and which ones to take offline. This creates a more considerate approach that your customers will like.
Harness Social Media to Better Serve your Customers
Social media is continuously evolving with each site introducing new features to bolster engagements. Thus, you also need to adapt to better use social media for customer service. Follow these strategies and you can better draw your customers online.