Best Practices for Customer Service on Social Media
Customers are the heart of every business. After all, without your customers, your company couldn’t exist. Far too often, however, the customer experience is not everything we want or hope it to be.
Challenges relating to the customer experience are often linked to poor customer service but, again, overcoming obstacles to stellar service is not always easy. The good news, though, is that business leaders today have a powerful new tool at their disposal.
Indeed, social media platforms are not just for communicating and building relationships with your customers. Now more than ever, social media is perhaps your greatest customer service asset. This article describes the role of social media in galvanizing customer service and describes some best practices for making it happen!
A Direct Route to Customers
Every savvy business leader knows that excellent customer service is all about connecting with your clients. Historically, though, building such connections took time, time which few of us have to spare in this increasingly fast-paced world.
Thanks to social media, though, you don’t have to confine your customer outreach to brick-and-mortar storefronts and ordinary operating hours. Rather, by building a robust presence across a range of social media platforms, you can connect with diverse markets, including both established and prospective customers.
Such connections are often the critical first step in understanding who your customers are, what they want, what they expect, and what they need. And when you are able to answer those questions accurately and comprehensively, you will also have the tools you need to tailor a customer service strategy that is second to none in the eyes of your target market.
For example, engaging with your audience across multiple platforms will inevitably require you to approach each demographic differently. Consumers who primarily use Instagram, for example, tend to be younger and more focused on user-generated video content than audiences who prefer Facebook or Pinterest.
Understanding who you are engaging with on each platform and how best to communicate with them on that platform is essential to garnering the information you need to devise effective customer service solutions for each unique demographic.
The Power of Data
Optimizing your customer service through social media is about more than knowing how to communicate with your customers across diverse platforms. There is some information that you may not be able to get simply by reading your customers’ posts or talking with them online.
Social media analytics is an ideal way to overcome the inevitable limitations of direct engagement. Best of all, an increasing number of data analytics technologies enable business leaders to collect, archive, and analyze data without enlisting the help of an IT specialist.
What this means is that by engaging with your target customers on social media, you can potentially generate massive volumes of customer data that can be applied to your overall service strategies.
Social media analytics, for instance, can help you better understand what your customers do on social media, including what competitor ads they respond to, the kinds of social media forums they visit, and how much time they dedicate to watching product demos or influencer reviews.
All of this can provide critical insight into your customers’ interests and values. Analytics can help you identify the gaps in product and service solutions that your company, alone among your competitors, may begin to fill.
Social Media and Customer Service Workflow
As we’ve already seen, optimal customer service is about building connections with customers, about learning who they are and what they want and require. This requires a particular set of skills that are as vital in the virtual space as it is in the physical one.
For this reason, when you’re seeking to unleash the power of social media to enhance your customer service strategy, you must resist the temptation to become overly reliant on technology. To be sure, analytics tools will be immensely beneficial when gathering the large volumes of data you need to make informed decisions regarding your company’s approach to customer service.
However, you also need to prioritize human interaction in your customer experience (CX). Artificial intelligence (AI) tools, for instance, will be a great resource for collecting and analyzing data on social media, but when it comes to engaging with customers online, your best bet is to leave that to your human workers. Focus on building a robust customer service presence on social media and using your most empathic, intuitive, and eloquent professionals.
By ensuring that your social media platforms are populated by experienced, well-trained, and highly engaged agents, you’re going to cultivate a stellar brand reputation for responsiveness, engagement, and customer care. And those are the true hallmarks of outstanding customer service!
Social media may well be a business leader’s most powerful asset when it comes to providing exceptional customer service. The key is to unleash the power of social media to build customer connections and to better understand who your target audience is and what, precisely, they need and expect from your company.
- Best Practices for Customer Service on Social Media - December 28, 2022
