How To Use Social Media As A Tool For Customer Service?
A brand’s success depends upon its ability to build great relationships with its customers, and many brands today leverage social media for the very purpose. Social media can significantly influence sales and brand loyalty. Although people used social media for their personal goals in the initial days, it has quickly gained prominence amongst businesses as a platform for growth.
Social media also has a prominent role in customer support services. Brands like Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook enable quick and easy communication between customers and representatives. In doing so, it also widens your network and scope.
Similarly, there are other ways social media can be an excellent asset for customer support services.
Using Social Media to Offer Great Customer Support Services
Social media can be an excellent tool for customer service. It lets you connect with your customers and develop a solid social media strategy to acquire customers.
Also, by using different social media platforms to establish a good relationship with your customers, you can encourage them to recommend your brands or services to others in their network.
However, to achieve this, you must implement a customer support strategy that changes the way corporates think. Customer support, which includes online customer service, shouldn’t be limited to resolving customer queries and issues. As a customer support representative, your job should also be to reach out and know what customers want before asking for it.
Now, there are three ways to do this.
1. By building authentic customer relationships
One of the best things about social media is that it is not only a tool for promoting businesses but also for building brands. With social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, you can build great relationships with your customers and engage them on various levels. By doing so, you can also increase conversion rates for your business.
2. By focusing more on the customer advocate base
Let’s say your customer has had a bad experience with your services. The first thing that they are likely to do is to write a negative review explaining their predicament. However, instead of responding to those comments, what you can do is revamp your business strategy to provide excellent customer service that helps create a strong, loyal customer base. That way, your customers will vouch for your brands in case someone has something bad to say about them.
3. By sharing feedback
When you share the feedback that you get from your customers about your products or services with your internal teams, it opens new and innovative opportunities for your employees to resolve customer queries.
Doing so will also let team members think of different ways to approach the problem. For instance, when one of your team members proposes a solution, they can share it with other members, or even other departments, so that they get a chance to build upon it and address customer needs in a better way.
So, now you know the role of using social media in establishing effective communication between the management and employees of the organisation. However, you won’t achieve customer satisfaction just by establishing a robust internal communication system. There must also be mutual trust between your brand and your customers. Only then will you be able to drive sales.
How to Drive Sales Using Social Media Customer Service?
Businesses, including several e-commerce platforms, are already leveraging popular social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram to effectively sell their services and provide their prospects with the information they need.
Social media also helps provide better business support service to prospects.
You can do two things to get your brand out to your customers with the help of social media platforms.
1. Set up a dedicated customer service social media handle
Using social media for customer relationship management is all about having a dedicated account, and preferably, a dedicated channel to address customer needs. To make it more effective, you can also provide links to the customer support page on your social media profile.
You should also make sure that you respond to all customer queries even if you get some wrong ones. Doing so shows that you are being proactive in handling the concerns of your customers.
2. Use social tools
To address customer queries better, there are various social tools that you can use, some of which include:
- Messaging apps
You have many messaging apps, like Facebook Messenger, that you can use to provide great customer support services. These apps serve as an effective way to communicate with your customers and resolve their queries and concerns. Using these apps, you can also get to know your customers better.
- Live chat features
The live chat feature is yet another great option to provide customer service. With this feature, you can respond to customer queries in real-time and address any concerns they may have with your products or services.
- Chatbots
Chatbots are an efficient way to address customer queries, just like live chat. They not only respond in real-time but can also be quick and accurate with their answers. With chatbots, customers don’t have to wait to get their queries resolved as the responses are instantaneous. Also, by incorporating chatbots to provide customer support services, you can cut costs and allocate those resources for the more important aspects of your business.
Tips for Using Social Media to Provide Great Customer Service
As suggested earlier, social media can be a great tool to provide high-quality customer support services. However, you can follow these tips to get even better engagement from your customers.
1. Know what your buyers want
Don’t forget to know your customers better to get them to be genuinely interested in your brands. Your customer support services team should have at least one member who understands your customer’s needs, buying habits, and preferences.
The customer representative should also be able to respond to tweets or customer service requests quickly and accurately. You can have the same team member to manage your social media accounts. That way, he or she can respond to requests in a better way.
2. Keep track of customer service request volumes
Another thing that you should be doing is tracking your customer support request volumes. For this, you can use any of your social media accounts. You can also use various tools to track incoming customer support requests, many of which you can integrate with your social media accounts.
3. Create guidelines
Using social media to provide customer support services has both positive and negative aspects. Creating guidelines that conform to your brand will reduce the impact the negative elements can have on your brand.
The guidelines may include things like the tone of voice, the response time on each of the platforms, FAQs, the protocols that you follow for escalations, and a permission management system through which you can track, receive, and approve request messages from your customers.
Last Words
Having a great customer support services team that responds quickly to customer queries and problems is vital, but more importantly, try and automate service requests as much as possible. It will save you precious time and allow you to focus on other crucial aspects of your business.
Also read:
1) Social Media Ideas For Business.
2) What Is Social Media Management? Benefits & more.
3) 11 Easy Ways for Small Businesses to promote their Business on Social Media
4) Which of the Social Media Platforms is Important for Marketing?
5) OkCredit: Simple, Paperless & Secure solution for businesses
FAQs
Q. How do I handle negative feedback from a customer on social media?
To address negative feedback from your customers, you must first address their concerns immediately so that you can regain their trust. Once you do that, you can use content moderation solutions to incorporate the comment filtering feature that should help you to resolve customer queries in the future.
Q. Can you retain your customers by using social media customer service?
Ans. If you want to use social media customer service to retain your customers, you should do these four things.
- Ask all the relevant questions.
- Share with your customers all that is happening with your brand.
- Host a contest with prizes and giveaways.
- Try hosting a private chat session with some of your customers.
Q. Can a social media customer strategy flow from one channel to the other?
Ans. Any social media customer strategy will work across different social media channels. However, they may be harder to implement than you think.