Where Social Media Meets Customer Service
Remember the days when we would send a strongly-worded letter to the head office of a company after a poor experience? Remember the days when we would call a company? Remember when we would email them? As one generation took over from the one before, the ways in which we contacted a company changed…and they’re changing again.
These days, consumers are hunting for fast solutions and this is now coming through online support. Rather than speaking to somebody on the phone or potentially waiting days for an email response, we can ask a question on a Facebook page, Twitter profile, or live chat and get a response almost immediately. Even if you’ve been opposed to the social media wave, it’s now becoming impossible to ignore.
Ending the Debate
Yes, Facebook and other social media platforms started as a way to keep up to date with friends, family, and colleagues. Now, it has two very different sides. The ‘social’ side is still clearly important, but the business side continues to grow and evidence of this comes with paid ads. More people than ever are heading to social media to get answers to their questions.
Whether they have a question or a complaint, they’ll head to their preferred platform. When they do this, they expect a response. If they make an effort to send a message, but don’t get a response, it will frustrate the individual while also sending a negative message to all other prospective customers. Social media has become one of the most important customer service tools.
Interesting Statistics and Dealing with Complaints
In the second half of this guide, we’ll take you through some tips on how to master social media for customer service purposes. For now, let’s look at some statistics that show the importance of social media while also discussing the art of dealing with complaints.
- Nearly nine in ten consumers with a poor experience choose to move across to a competitor
- Just under half of all consumers use social media as an outlet for their poor experiences
- Consumers spend up to 40% more money after engaging with a company on social media
We can see the power of social media and the influence it has on the wider market in those three statistics. With this in mind, how do you deal with complaints? How do you ensure that the 45% of people who have bad experiences and post online don’t impact the reputation of your company?
When people are posting on social media about their poor experience, you can assume they’re heavily frustrated because a slight disappointment will normally pass without too much of a problem. Therefore, we advise against provoking them or making this even worse. Often, they’ve gone through your other customer service channels and not had a result.
The first thing to realize about a situation like this is that people are watching. Unlike a phone call where you’re communicating directly with the customer, you’re on a platform where everybody sees what’s happening. If you reply in the wrong way, this will turn prospective customers away. If you handle it in the right way, you’ll not only get respect but could even gain a customer.
Firstly, we recommend starting with an apology for the inconvenience (even if you feel you aren’t to blame) and a quick line to say that you’re working towards a resolution. Especially when you can’t provide them with help immediately, let the customer know that you’re working on it. If you want to stop people from interjecting and continue the conversation one-on-one, give them an email address or a phone number.
From here, you can offer a solution or an explanation as to why they had a poor experience whether it’s a design fault, poor customer service in a store, or whatever the reason may be.
If you follow this advice and deal with problems effectively and promptly, social media actually becomes a useful customer service tool rather than a hindrance for your brand.
Our Advice for Social Customer Service
We understand more about online support, so let’s provide some advice on how to successfully provide customer support through any social media platform.
1. Be Present in Important Areas
Before anything else, you need to determine the location of your customers. With so many social media platforms, it makes sense to create an active profile on the one your customers are most likely to congregate on and socialize. Generally speaking, Facebook and Twitter are the two most popular platforms because the majority of audiences are found here. According to Business Insider, Facebook had nearly 2.5 billion monthly active users in the first quarter of 2019. With this in mind, it’s a social hub for most audiences.
Companies who concentrate their efforts on LinkedIn, Google+, Instagram, and Pinterest can be equally successful with social customer service.
To find the right platform, consider mentions of your brand and where you have a presence. Over time, reply to comments and questions, interact with customers, and offer the online support that your audience craves.
2. Pay Attention to Customer Conversations
With the right tools, you can track what people are saying about your brand and you’ll have access to every single mention online. Thanks to the Institute of Customer Service, we also know that around 33% of people look to communicate or ask advice from a company directly on social media. This is a valuable learning tool, don’t let it go to waste.
What kind of issues are raised on social media? What conversations are customers having? What percentage of comments are feedback? Does your FAQs page answer most of the common questions? Is there a specific time of day when most of the questions come in? Would brand mentions benefit from a company response? Are there a significant number of comments written in anger after failing to get through to your normal customer support channels?
By answering these questions and analyzing the activity that takes place on social media, we have an opportunity to really improve our service. Not only can you improve your website, you have topics for blog posts, can distribute resources more effectively, and have help with decision-making.
3. Taking an Issue Away from the Spotlight
We’ve highlighted the benefits of dealing with issues when everybody is watching, but this isn’t true of all cases. When you’re limited to a certain number of characters, it may not be possible to deal with every single complaint. It might be that a particular customer is seething and won’t back down or that the help you need to provide is especially technical. On Twitter, for example, the last thing you need is to clog your profile with angry or long-winded explanatory tweets.
Your customer service team needs to know when an issue should be moved ‘offline’. This might be because you need to ask for sensitive information or the conversation would be too long to have on social media. There’s no need to complicate this, a simple message will suffice. Here’s an example:
‘We apologize for the inconvenience. Please head over to our website and use the Live Chat feature so we can talk more about your order.’
Once they’ve done this and the problem is resolved, ALWAYS go back to social media and leave a comment. For example:
‘Thank you for reaching out, James. We’re glad we could resolve the problem for you!’
This way, everybody who comes across the complaint or comment will see that you actively helped and resolved the problem.
Read More: Understanding LinkedIn’s Algorithm: Posting Successful Content
4. Additional Tips
Thank you for reading our guide to social media as a customer service tool. To finish, here’s some more advice on offering fast solutions for your consumers and boosting your reputation online:
- If you receive lots of requests and questions, you might be better off implementing a customer service platform designed to transform tweets and comments into tickets. This way, no question slips through the net. Of course, you’ll need to prioritize complaints, technical questions, and other urgent issues.
- Don’t forget, customers come to social media because they expect a response quickly. In fact, many studies show that most people expect a reply on the same day — or at least within 24 hours. If you lack the resources or receive a high volume of messages, work on a generalized response so people know you’ve seen the message and will get around to them soon enough.
- Follow all the normal principles of customer care; just because this is a more casual, relaxed environment, it doesn’t mean normal customer support principles are lost.
Bonus! Marketing Tools:
2. Bilbi AI: Daily Marketing Campaign Insights
