The importance of social media cannot be ignored. The more you invest in training your staff for an improved customer service, the more customer retention and loyalty your business witnesses.
But with the digitalization of modern businesses, almost all enterprises have an online outlet. This means that they need to provide the same level of customer service that they do in their physical shops. This can sometimes be challenging for the business owners as they consider most of their online businesses to be promoted only with the help of social media platforms.
What they fail to realize is that they can provide equally good, if not more, customer service on their social media platforms. Before we explore different aspects of social media customer service, first it is important to understand what social media customer service is.
Customer service provided to clients on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter is known as Social Customer Service. This type of customer service doesn’t require lengthy procedures. All that the CSRs have to do is to promptly reply to any queries the customers have. Nearly 70% of customers are of the view that quicker solutions to the problems is an essential component of a good CS. This means that social customer service is crucial for any business.
Since most of the marketing and advertising activities by businessmen is carried out on Facebook and Twitter, it makes these two platforms indispensable tools of successful marketing strategy, calling out for a quick customer service on these platforms extremely important. According to the findings from a study carried out by Q2 2016 Sprout Social Index, almost 90 percent of customers who participated in the survey admitted that they had interacted with the brand through any of their social media platform. More than a quarter of these customers (34.5%) said they felt more comfortable communicating via social media rather than relying on conventional methods like phone calls and emails.
While the term “social care” is not something that has come into consideration recently, providing consistent customer support on multi-channels including social platforms can be an uphill task for both wholesalers and retailers. But with this challenge comes an immense opportunity to increase customer loyalty and retention, if the process is seamless and helps tick the customer’s sweet spot. The experience typically involves resonating the outlet’s ideology on its Facebook’s page. Just creating a Facebook page won’t help you realize your goals. In order to get soaring sales and exponential growth, you need to think out of the box and manage your page with posts that attract people of similar interests.
But the real question is how can you utilize your social media presence to create a mammoth effect on your customers that they keep coming back for more? This feature will help you explore the different ways that help you get the most with social media care.
Stay Around Your Customers
The first step on your journey of social media care is to first prioritize where you need to spend most of your focus and time on. The marketing teams are responsible for directing traffic towards the business’ social platforms while CSRs should be available to provide their help when the customers have landed on these platforms and have started socializing. For most of the businesses providing social care on Facebook and Twitter would be the area to focus on most, while others might consider Google+, Instagram, Pinterest and other social sites of significance. This would primarily depend on the nature of your business, audience and marketing strategy.
A good way to identify your audience within the social media platforms is to search where your brand is mentioned the most on the various platforms. Though this might be a first step towards chalking an impressive marketing strategy, it is not ideal to totally rely on your online commenters to talk about your brand so that Google algorithm can track it.
If your audience isn’t involved in talking about your brand online, think of ways that you can initiate conversations regarding the functionality of your brand. Then you can easily add in a client into the conversation who can provide some services.
It’s basically the customers not the brand that can help build a positive vibe about the business. Therefore, it is of utmost importance that the conversations on platforms such as Facebook shouldn’t be taken lightly and there should be an employee present there to provide the right information in case of queries or confusions. According to research conducted by Conversocial nearly 90% of customers abandon the brand if they do not get their queries answered online.
Be A Good Listener
There are a lot of marketing tools readily available that help in searching the brand’s name with the help of automation, or match keywords with specific social media pages. However, good listening skills of a poised CSR are equally important. Based on the studies from Institute of Customer Service, 1 out of every 3 customers seeks advice from social media and this makes listening an important factor.
Based on the activity that your business produces on social media, it is very important that you analyse it critically to be aware of the major issues of concern amongst your customers. Small business can get useful insights by collecting information for about a month, while bigger companies can get an idea from collecting data from a week’s activity.
When gathering insights, be mindful of the following questions:
- How many comments are from dissatisfied customers from inefficient customer service, both offline and online?
- How many customers have queries regarding technical issues?
- Is the feedback from customers purely negative or positive? How many comments are from happy customers and how many from dissatisfied clients?
- How many existing content with links satisfy customer queries?
- How many responses can help you brand gain customers?
- What time are your customers most active on social media?
The answers to these critical questions can help you in planning and staffing. Decide upon a strategy that can enables you to resolve maximum of your customer queries. Now you need to decide whether you would be providing all the support through social care or you need to pitch in another line to cater to the huge volume of queries.
You can easily find tools that will help generate reports based on volume and time required to deal with the customers, and this can paint a clear picture about what your customer is exactly looking for and how much you can provide him. For example you may figure out that your customers are most active during night hours when your staff is off duty. In such a case it would be a good idea to hire some employees to perform the night shift so that your customers’ queries are dealt with promptly.
Be Mindful Of Volume
The metrics of the industry that you are operating in has a lot to do with your social media audience. Usually, you’ll come across a lot of distractions on social media. You goal, however, is to get past these distractions and find out your real audience and cater to their problems accordingly. Based on your company’s size, the volume of social media content and the number of employees that you have, it’s a good idea to have a customer support centre that can streamline all the customer requests and comments into meaningful queries across all social channels and pass it on to the employees as tickets. This way you can provide a speedy solution without having to get caught up in the huge bulk of comments and tweets, fishing out the queries and responding to them.
However, while turning the comments and tweets into tickets, it is very important to have your filter on so that you can avoid answering unnecessary questions. This would also save you from dealing with data that is too big to monitor. The purpose of a well-developed multi-channel customer support system is to provide useful content to its customers. For this, the more you get to know about your customer, the better.
In the digital world that we live today, your customer is looking for ease of communication. Prompt response to their queries will make your customers feel valued and listened to. Therefore, make it a point to take your social media tickets seriously and provide speedy responses to your customer queries.
While defining your social media queries, you should keep the following criteria in your mind:
- Technical assistance related questions
- Complaints, grudges from displeased customers
- Product exchanges, returns or request that need to be dealt at your earliest
- Complaints that can trigger a callout match and some PR damage
Usually the less important queries or conversations are the ones that bring in loyal, returning customers. You may want to consider responding to:
- Replying to general queries about your product or service
- Thanking your customers who give positive feedback about your products on social platforms.
- Connecting with people who speak well about your brand and brand experience without expecting any response from you.
Know That Time Is The Real Money
It is important to emphasize again that speed of response in social care is of utmost importance. There are several studies that reiterate this point; majority of online customers expect the same-day response to their queries.
A big challenge while providing seamless social care is that tweets and comments can languish and the response can get delayed to up to 20 hours, causing restlessness amongst customers.
The best way to cope with this problem is to choose an intermediate response time or at least promise something of that context. It is also important to provide the answer through the same channel and a correct one. This can be conveniently done by initially responding on social media and then moving to another customer support channel.
End Note
The significance of social media care and its far-reaching impact cannot be denied. If you are looking for a burgeoning online business, then social media care is definitely something you don’t want to miss out on. Not only it will help you improve your line, it will also remove discrepancies in your communication system increasing customer satisfaction and retention.
