Is Your Social Media Customer Service Helping or Hurting Your Customer Experience – Justin Osborne
Customer service is getting harder and more complex year after year. As the number of communication channels keeps growing steadily, businesses have to stay alert and embrace each mechanism that can leave customers feeling happy and satisfied.
According to the report, 90% of Americans use customer service as a factor in deciding whether or not to do business with a company. There are so many platforms to take into account, but social networks are gradually becoming the most dominant customer service channel in the world where over two billion people use social media daily.
If you are not using the likes of Facebook and Twitter to answer users’ inquiries, your social media pages might as well be hurting and ruining the entire customer service strategy. This article will show you why you must use social networks for customer interactions and how to do it most productively.
Why You Need to Provide Customer Service on Social Media
Customer service on social networks is definitely a game-changer and it bothers too many brands and businesses. Here’s how a typical entrepreneur thinks: “Customer service is already versatile and complicated enough, so why would I bother answering users’ complaints on Facebook?”
The question is totally legit, but the answer is more than reasonable as well. Let’s see what statistical reports say about this topic:
- Over 80% of consumers use social networks to engage with brands.
- 1 in 3 social media users prefer social media customer care services to telephone or email.
- More than 60% of marketers say that social media will become the top customer support channel by 2020.
If you take all these stats into account, the answer to the social media customer service dilemma becomes easy. Namely, you have to give fans the opportunity to address you via social platforms simply because they demand it.
Here’s a good example: essay writers and custom essay writers at dissertations services work primarily with young people who spend most of their online time on social networks. In such circumstances, it would be foolish not to take advantage of Twitter and other platforms to interact with their clients.
The same logic applies to pretty much any other business. Although the new mechanism makes customer service more demanding, it also comes with a fair share of practical benefits:
- It augments your customer service strategy
- It boosts professional credibility
- It skyrockets customer satisfaction rates
- It leads to a higher profit in the long run
5 Ways to Turn Social Media into Customer Service Channels
The importance of social networks for the overall customer service strategy should be more than clear by now, so the only real question is how to make it all work properly. We selected five practical tips that can help you to turn social platforms into powerful customer service channels.
#1. Be agile and proactive
The number one rule of social media marketing is to stay agile and proactive. The rule becomes even more important when you take customer service into consideration since more than 40% of customers who complain through social media expect a response within one hour.
Your job is to stay focused and monitor the behaviour of your followers.
Jake Gardner, a digital marketer who wrote the college-paper.org review, says a good idea is to narrow down business operations: “Instead of creating business pages on dozens of networks, you should concentrate on two or three social platforms that gather the majority of your target consumers.”
#2. Keep it personal
The second tip is to personalize customer service because you want to make people feel acknowledged and appreciated. After all, nearly half of all consumers claim that a personalized response from a business would strengthen their brand loyalty.
You can do it by addressing users by their names, but it’s only the basic trick. Another thing you need to do is to analyze previous interactions with the same follower. The history of mutual communication will show you what a given users likes or dislikes, so you will be able to tailor answers and reply appropriately.
#3. Add the new channel to the wider customer service arsenal
Social media customer service is not supposed to function separately. On the contrary, you must see it as the way to supplement the existing set of channels and ensure seamless integration on the go. Keep in mind that 90% of customers expect consistent interactions across multiple channels.
This means that consumers expect brands to deliver messages in the same style regardless of the communication platform. Therefore, you need to synchronize social, email, live chat, phone, and chatbot services and make them work as one 24/7.
#4. Consistency is essential
Another thing you have to be aware of is consistency. The digital world is never asleep, which means that customers will be sending you requests, questions, and comments around the clock. While you do not have to answer each message instantly, you do have to be consistent and available every day.
You cannot afford to go on and off here because you will be in risk of destroying professional authority. The best solution is to strictly determine your opening and closing hours and let the audience know they can expect your replies within this period.
#5. Share information with other teams
The last tip on our list is to behave proactively and share information with the members of other teams. We are talking about the entire customer service department, but you should also keep the sales and marketing teams informed as well.
Doing so, your company will be able to react to users’ insights and improve services accordingly. This is a critical feature because 97% of consumers are more likely to maintain loyalty to a brand that implements changes based on their feedback.
Conclusion
Customer service is gradually becoming the most important business driver and brand differentiator. Consumers expect you to answer their questions and complaints across multiple channels, with social networks becoming one of the main pieces in the customer service puzzle. In this post, you could learn the following:
- The benefits of using social media for customer service purposes
- Five ways to turn social platforms into customer service tools
Social media-focused customer service demands a lot of work and full dedication, but it pays off quickly because you can turn fans into loyal buyers. Remember our tips and build social media customer service that is improving consumer experience.
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