The Beginners Guide to Social Media Customer Service

Social media customer service is all about providing services to the customer in your social media handles. In simpler words, it is the practice of using social media handles to resolve customer questions and concerns. It is considered to be highly effective, because most of the consumers expect their queries to be answered in the social media. As they spend a lot of time in social media. It is because people want brands like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram to offer social media support. 1 billion messages are exchanged between people and businesses every month on Facebook messenger. 70% of people expect to message businesses more in the future for customer service questions in the respective social media handles. People are more into social media customer service because, people like messaging than calling to the business. This results in saving of time and energy. The online social media world offers much more than just sales opportunities; many businesses often sees it as just a tool to place ads. The customer services provided by social media is a great way to bring your business to another level. Great customer service on a right platform always leads to more loyalty, and more sales. Stick to this article till last, to know a lot of interesting facts about social media customer service and the ways to improve it.

Tips to have Good Customer Services in Social Media

Create a Committed handle for Social Media Support:

When you have a dedicated social media team to address customer service, makes all your effort worthy. Maintaining a separate customer service handles can have a lot of advantages for your company. You can get the transparency in the customer’s problem and address their problem quickly. A customer service team can address the customers more detail than social marketing team. This is the reason why having a social media account separately for customer service can help.

Remember to create social media guidelines:

Like everything, even social media handles should also have separate guidelines. The guidelines which you follow can determine a lot about a company. Your team should follow those guidelines properly which is also similar to your company’s values. Make sure to have guidelines which is satisfactory in the perspective of customers. The guidelines should include:

• Make sure your tone of voice is right while speaking to the customer.
• Have an accurate response time
• Protocol for escalations or other customer issues.
• Have a proper message approval procedure and a permission management system.

Always be proactive:

You should avoid waiting for the complaint to come in, and address them. You should consider using social media monitoring software to find out the issues before the customers find their way to you. You can add keywords to your software like “problem” and “issues, so that you can solve the problem easily without waiting for them to be overblown.

Customers will definitely appreciate this effort, as you have found their problem and addressed it without they seek your help. This increases the brand value. They will be impressed that you care about them a lot to find out their problems even before they have addressed it to you. This makes the relationship with the customer strong,

Learn to Manage Customer Expectations:

Customer do not have same expectation for all the companies to offer customer service on social media. You should make sure that you set their expectations properly. The customer service differs based on the size of the time.

So, make sure to make customer clear about the time taken to find the solutions to their problems, also make it clear how long will you take to respond. If there are other ways in which they can find the answers for their queries, then do keep them informed about it.

Respond quickly:

When customers reach out to brands on social media, they expect quick and friendly response. This is the reason they are reaching you out on social media handles. Make sure your customer service hour availability is clear. Provide information to the customer about how to reach them when you are offline. You might not have 24/7 customer service, and that’s completely fine. You should set the customer expectations appropriately.

For example, Facebook uses away messaging to provide an automated response when the customer service team is offline. In the 90% cases, if you respond to the customers within 15 minutes, then you will earn a “Very Responsive to Messages” Badge. Which will also earn the trust of the customers.

Make your public conversation with the customer private:

The customer would prefer to speak to you privately than opening up about their issues in public. It would even be better for you to address them in private to keep the things confidential. For instance, you might require confidential information like Account number, product booking number, etc.

On Facebook, you are allowed to respond to a public comment in their private message. This will make you to interact with the customer directly in the Facebook messenger. It is very easy to address them privately. Just below the public comment, you’ll get option of Message to respond privately.

This will make your chats with the customer confidential, and even the customer will feel safe about it. This also helps to resolve the issue quickly.

Ask for and encourage Feedback:

Be Social:

The main motive of any customer service should focus on being social with the customers. Especially, social media customer service will be helpful to you, only if you engage with the customers in a friendly way. You should make them feel like they are speaking to a friend, not to an employee of a brand. If it becomes a broadcast medium instead of a conversation, you’ll lose followers quicker than you gain them.

Go for the tips to gain more followers and brand loyalty. Level up your brand by using social media customer service tips mentioned above.