7 Tips to Stay on Top of Social Media Customer Service
Social media requires a significant amount of time and attention if you want it to produce results. That includes staying on top of your social media customer service. However, most people have no idea how to deliver exceptional customer service via their social media pages. Here are seven tips for exactly how you can go about doing just that.
1. Go Where Your Customers Are
A social media platform that works well for one business might not work for another. Therefore, you should figure out where your customers spend most their time. This will allow you to focus on a site where you messages will be heard versus wasting your time on a site your audience rarely visits. There are several survey tools you can use to learn directly from your audience where they most frequently hang out, such as TypeForm and Google Forms.
2. Monitor Your Social Media Accounts
Your social media tasks don’t end after you’ve delivered your content for the day. It’s imperative that you have someone monitoring your social media accounts to engage with your customers directly. This means answering their questions, addressing their concerns or simply engaging in friendly banter. This will show your customers that you truly care and that you appreciate them as a customer. It also helps to serve as an example of how they would be treated should they choose to become a customer. So, don’t just be a social media marketing geek make sure to also use it as a customer service too.
3. Get Rid of Scripted Messages
There’s nothing more impersonal than when you receive a scripted message from a company who claims to care about you personally. A scripted message just screams you don’t truly care and all that really matters is your money. Get rid of your scripted messages and replace them with personalized messages that address a customer’s specific profile of interests such as previous purchases, etc. And the same goes for having your customer service teams reading off a script. Let them be human and deal with other humans on a personal level versus sounding like a robot.
4. Speed Matters
When dealing with social media speed matters. The time it takes you to respond could directly affect your brand’s reputation. If you have someone available to immediately address a customer’s concerns or a complaint, you will reduce the amount of damage negative feedback can produce. Just imagine that you have a customer who posted a rant about your company. With live feeds, many people will receive that negative rant immediately. Therefore, if you don’t have a system in place to engage with your followers while they are active on your sites, you might not be able to harness that negative feedback before it does significant damage to your brand.
5. Take Control of the Feedback
The benefit of continually engaging with your social media audiences is that it will allow you to control the feedback you are receiving, at least to some extent. This goes with what I mentioned above about the speed in which you engage with your audience. The moment you see a negative comment you have the opportunity to take control of that feedback. Your interaction and offer to help resolve a complaint will show your potential customers exactly how you handle your business interactions. This will allow them to decide for themselves based on the facts whether or not they should do business with you versus only getting a negative rant that could sway their opinion in the other direction.
6. Digital Customer Service Requires Practice
As you know, it’s sometimes difficult to express your intended message when delivering social media customer service because the person on the other end can’t hear your tone of voice. Therefore, it’s imperative that your team knows how to accurately read and manage many different situations. If the customer uses emoticons, let your team know it’s OK for them to reciprocate. If it appears the customer isn’t fluent in your language, then you need to instruct your team to avoid slang and other jargon. And if the customer appears to be frustrated or upset, you should instruct your agents to empathize and be as reassuring as possible so the customer understands your team is there to help. The best way to train your team in social media customer service is to show them examples of other companies Twitter feeds and Facebook posts, etc. then teach them the right and wrong ways to handle those issues based on your company’s philosophy.
7. Give Your Social Media Team Some Authority
People hate dealing with a customer service agent who doesn’t have enough knowledge or the authority to help them. Train your customer service agents in the most frequently received issues and give them a certain amount of authority to handle those issues on the spot rather than having to escalate them to another agent for a resolution.
If you would like some help implementing any of these ideas, please contact us and let us show you what we can do for you and your team.
What’s Next?
How does your company stay on top of customer service through social media? Make sure to share them with us in the comments below. I would love to read them.
About the Author:
Sophorn Chhay
Sophorn is the marketing guy at Trumpia, a mobile content delivery service that allows users to customize their one-to-one marketing efforts by interconnecting and optimizing all digital platforms.
