Keys To Boost Your Customer Service On Social Media | Ideta

Customer Service on social media has become one of the greatest concerns for brands. Indeed to maintain good customer relationships with their customers, companies have to show their presence online, and more precisely on social media. Moreover, customers expect reactivity from brands by answering their queries very quickly; that is why customer service on social media makes sense and that is why brands should take care of this as part of their brand strategy.

What is a Good Customer Service on Social Media?

When a customer wants some help about a product they would like to buy or that they already bought, they expect to receive an answer quite fast. Therefore, it seems essential to be prepared and plan what will be your strategy for customer service . As part of customer service on social media, companies will provide help and customer support on these channels. It can be social media posts or private messages. The goal is to remain helpful at every stage of the customer journey by bringing the right answers at the right moments. This can also be done by answering FAQS via a chatbot that will allow customers to be more autonomous on their quest for help. Customers can reach out your brands on this very social media and ask for customer service at any time. It makes your brand more available and shows that you take into account the users’s needs with flexibility.

Why pay attention to customer service on social media?

There are many reasons why customer service on social media should be implemented. Let’s take a look at one of them.

A Faster Time-to-Answer

Millenials resort more and more to communicate via social media. It is also the case concerning their relationship with brands. A majority of millennials is more keen on using social media to answer their customer service questions, rather than classic communication channels such as phones or emails. Being less patient than ever, customers will favor brands that takes care of their issues within less than an hour. This element can be a competitive advantage if competitors’ time-to-answer is slower or non existent on social media.

Brand Image Concerns

Leaving your customers with unanswered questions will give a bad reputation to your company. Social Media users could join the complaint comments and the issue will only get bigger and bigger. Plus, seeing a lot of negative comments left without closure can convince people out of buying your products. Providing a quality customer service on social media will show that you are open to find solutions for your customers. Using a dedicated social media profile for customer service is also an idea worth being planned. You will thus have a dedicated channel where you will be able to collect data about users’ complaints and be able to analyse more in depth the pain points in the buyer journey.

Budget Considerations

Providing customer service on social media is also a way of cutting operational costs. Indeed the costs of a call center are highly more important than the implementation of a chatbot for instance. Even when this latter is deployed on several channels. Plus customer service on social media via chatbots or else can turn a potential leads into an engaged customers if all answered are being answered in time, thus providing a seamless experience to consumers.

A Pro Active Customer Service

Issues with a customer service on social media can be anticipated. It means that your brand can solve a problem even before anyone expresses it. By showcasing such qualities your brand will benefit from a higher customer satisfaction and an increasing loyalty from your customers. Showing that your brand communicates with transparency, proves that consumers’ interests are at the heart of your concerns.

Increased Trustworthiness

Connecting with your customers via social media contributes to build trust with brands. By using the same communication channels as they do with their personal life, consumers feel more at ease with the brand and tend to make stronger connections with them. Plus, it allows the brand to be more in phase with their consumers’ everyday life as they multiply interactions with them on many levels. Also it shows that you encourage your audience to engage with you and thus increase your brand visibility and emotional attachment across various channels.

Tips to Boost Your Customer Service on Social Media

Chatbot solution

Chatbots are an excellent way of providing your customers with 24/7 customer service. They can answer frequently asked questions immediately and in case of more complex answers, a human can takeover the conversation with the user. Chatbots can be deployed on many social media such as Facebook or Instagram, or even WhatsApp. To build your chatbot on social media you can use the FAQ’s and enrich it along the way with new questions. Plus, consumers are more and more at ease with chatbots because they can bring them the solution without having to wait for hours.

A Dedicated Customer Service Account

You can create a special account that will only answer customers’ questions such as @Hootsuite_Help or @BestBuySupport address. A customer service team is then in charge of answering questions and provide technical support with reactivity. It also allows to filter the issues from urgent to non urgent and organize your customer service by taking this into account.

Make sure to publish this address on your main account so as it is used wisely by your community. In case a question is asked on the main channel, you should answer via the technical support address to advertise it and move the conversation away from the main channel. But let the other users know that the request has been moved to another channel and has been processed by the customer service team.

Special Process

As it may bring you different opportunities, your way of approaching customers should be different on social media. It is important to prove that your companies will use the same values as on other channels but will adapt its tone to the channel. As we said earlier, by being present on social media, brands take more room on their customers’ personal life and get closer to them. A less formal tone can be appreciated and will show your audience that a special bond can be made between a brand and their consumers.

Amongst the important topics that must be discussed for social media communication, we have:

• Tone: friendly, formal?
• Time to answer: Less than 1 hour or more?
• What are the FAQs?
• How to collect consumers’ insights

Define Your Idea of a Customer Service on Social Media

The way that brands use social media for customer service may vary drastically from one company to another. You should state what are the limits of your customer service on social media: only restricted to solving issues, answering frequently asked questions, product recommendations? Of course, it will depend on the financial means you will put into your customer service but you need to check what your customers expect from your brand and what the competition is doing first.

Use the right channels

So the message can be understood efficiently, you have to communicate on the right channels. After studying where your customers are active and their habits as well as way of communicating, you will be able to hammer out an efficient strategy. Beware of the fact that some channels will be more prompt for brand image development and some for customer service. Social Media such as Twitter or Facebook can typically be used for customer service. 84 % of complaints are made on Facebook and 26 % on Twitter.