Introduction
In this modern business world, customers are spoiled for choices when it comes to choosing customer communication channels. And it is no surprise that social media is the staple of the customer service game. Say goodbye to the era of unlimited phone calls and endless email chain chains. Social media customer service is immediately accessible and provides direct contact between the consumer and the brands. Hence, companies need to focus on seamless customer service to satisfy customer needs. Customer support plays a significant role in the longevity of the brand reputation. In this blog, we are going to highlight the formulation of the social media customer service strategy.
Social media customer service is defined as the practice where brands use social media tools for resolving customer concerns. Social customer support can be highly effective as it allows the customers to reach their brands by using their preferred social media platforms which they are already using. It is one of the most critical and fast-growing customer contact channels within the entire ecosystem of customer service. It also involves various activities like providing guidance, issuing refunds, addressing complaints, and answering questions.
Nowadays, brands are much more active on their social media handles because customers are reaching the brand with their concerns. For effective social media customer service, brands must create a dedicated team and integrate software for resolving customer issues. Below are some best practices that will help brands in formulating the most effective and efficient social media customer service strategy.
1. Set Up Brand Monitoring
Brand monitoring is the crucial step when it comes to formulating a unique social media customer service strategy. Customize the tools used for brand monitoring that will help in identifying and list the comments and posts with specific phrases or words. This will eventually help you narrow down quickly to the most common and relevant content. Having multiple streams helps a brand in segmenting the customer concerns in a way so that the urgent issues can be prioritized. In this way, not only customers’ issues will be solved but also brand reputation and identity can be maintained.
There are a plethora of social media platforms available in the market. Not all channels will yield the same results for your business. It is very important to understand which social media platform has the most following base. Choose the ones where customers are likely to interact more with your brand. Or else, you can ask your customers through a survey which social media platforms they use the most. After knowing the answers, you can provide customer service assistance to your customer’s preferred network.
3. Determine The Posts That Gets Maximum Response
In social media, consumers will not only post positive comments but also will get many negative comments. Too. The brand must respond to both types of comments. The social media support team must avoid feeding the trolls of your brand and products. Determining the popular comments and posts will help you in reading the customer’s opinion regarding your brand. Hence, you can implement the changes in terms of product development and services accordingly. Ideally, the customer service team has to create an engagement with the customers without getting dragged to conversations unrelated to the business.
4. Consider Having a Dedicated Support Channel
Having a dedicated social media customer support team is proven to have immense benefits for the customers who need constant assistance for their issues. It will simultaneously reduce the challenge in tracking the customer queries and offer a reference platform where users can also check their past queries and chat history. For instance, with the use of live chat services on your website, you can reply back to the customers within a minute that will increase the brand reputation to the next level.
A social media customer service team can face multiple challenges while interacting with the customers. To avoid all these circumstances, creating proper guidelines for the social media response is crucial for improved customer satisfaction. The guidelines should strictly adhere to the brand guidelines and cover stuff like tone, voice, response time, escalation protocol, approval message, greeting message, handle time of the problems, etc. The guidelines will help the executives to work more efficiently than ever which will lead to higher customer satisfaction.
6. Manage Customer Expectations
Customers do not expect the same time to serve the same level of customer service from their social media handles. Recent studies confirmed that customers want to spend more on brands that offer higher levels of social customer service. For brands, managing customer expectation is a crucial aspect that needs to be focused otherwise customers can get offended and can spread negative word of mouth that will affect the brand reputation. Set your customers’ expectations in a way so that you can meet them effectively by letting them know that you care for your customers.
7. Be Proactive to Customer Queries
This may sound pretty obvious, but it is the criteria that brands need to follow. Being proactive to your customers is one of the most common and efficient ways that a brand needs to practice across all customer communication channels. Nowadays brands are putting more emphasis on their social media handles and are providing faster responses to the customers so that they can help them in making their purchase decision quicker. Answering all the queries in social media will show that your brand is responsible and cares about its customers’ needs.
8. Use Chatbot for Common Service Requests
Chatbots are one of the latest addition in the realm of customer service that is proven to have a multitude of benefits in offering basic answers to the customer’s queries 24*7 across the social media handles and the live chat platform. AI-powered chatbots are the most preferred bots used by brands as they have the always-on capability. As a frontline mode of serving customers, bots are an excellent way to solve common service requests that companies face more frequently.
9. Understand What Buyers Are Interested In
As a brand, it is essential to understand the sentiment of the customers. You should know what your customers are expecting from your products and services. Are they looking for any new features in your product? Or they may find your product too pricey? Do your customers prefer any products for your competitors? You should need all the data to amend the required development in your products and service. Social media platforms are the best way to keep on track with your followers and competitors so that you can stay ahead of the competition.
10. Learn from Customer Feedback
Arguably, negative feedback isn’t any fun to receive. But as a brand, it is important to utilize the feedback in their growth process. Each customer feedback should be your learning tool, be it positive or negative. A brand should take negative reviews as constructive criticism and should do required product development based on the needs of the customers. In addition to that, whatever the comment is, you should reply back in a very polite way so that you don’t lose any followers of your brand. Customer feedback should be tracked regularly and implement changes wherever required on a timely basis.
Time to Act
For the brands who are already active on social media networks for customer service, it is a matter of stepping up the efforts while making sure that they are meeting the effective customer needs. While many social media networks come and go, brands must identify their preferred network and manage it effectively. Customers will remember the company that will serve them in a crisis situation. Social media customer service can really help you in growing the business if nurtured properly. Build stronger relationships with your customers by serving them proactively across all your contact channels including social media networks so that you can form customer loyalty.
