Best practice in excellent customer service on social media

Social media is a powerful customer service tool – here is how to utilise it 

CREDIT: This is an edited version of an article that originally appeared on Beeketing

Studies reveal that 80% of consumers use social media to engage with brands – and solving an issue on social media is much cheaper than a call centre interaction! Since social media channels are open to the public, using them for customer service can be a great way to improve brand affinity and build a positive online reputation. You can build a loyal customer base by taking social media customer service more seriously and letting your customers know that you are always there for them.  Let’s look at some of the best practice that you should follow.

Choose the right social media channels

It is crucial that you pick the right channels for customer service – if you pick the wrong channels, you might end up wasting most of your resources while offering ineffective customer service. Monitor your customers’ online presence and pick a social media platform that your customers are most likely to use, or monitor your competitors to see the customer service channels that they rely on.

Set up brand monitoring 

Brand monitoring on social media platforms will help you have a proactive approach to customer service on these platforms. You can use brand monitoring tools to set up streams to identify any posts or content with your brand name. These streams can be used to identify both positive and negative words attached to your brand name. 

Create dedicated customer support 

You can create Facebook pages, or Twitter handles, that are specific to customer support, which will make it easier for your customer support team to sift through issues and queries and help to separate your content marketing from customer service. Moreover, having dedicated customer service pages or handles will also be of great help to your customers as they will be able to go through older requests and queries with ease. Having a handle specific to customer support will also assure your customers that your team is there to tend to their complaints and queries.

Make response times a priority

Compared to other customer service channels, the expectations of social media are quite high among customers; they expect much quicker responses and resolution times. Therefore, it is crucial that you make response time an absolute priority – even if you do not offer quick resolutions, it is vital that you acknowledge the customer’s query and assure them that your team is on it. Late responses may lead to a negative backlash from customers, negative reviews, and a bad reputation for your brand.

One of the best ways to handle social media customer service requests as quickly and efficiently possible is to set up an internal system where responsibilities are shared amongst the team; specific types of queries can be taken up by particular team members – this way, the response times will be drastically reduced, and queries will be handled more efficiently.

Be specific and personal with your responses 

Customer service is at the heart of any business, and plays a major role in determining the customer retention rate and lifetime value, so it is important to take special care in responding to requests – especially on social media channels where everything is open for everyone else to see. 

Your customer service responses should be personalised and specific, as generic responses will lead to unhappy customers and increased customer churn. Ensure that your customer support team acknowledges requests and queries with responses that are more specific, such as using the first name of the customers and the first name of the customer support assistant so customers associate responses with a real person instead of a brand. This instils confidence in the customer that an actual human being is looking into their request making them less agitated and more patient.

Create an internal system for social media customer service 

Trolls and negative backlash are common on social media platforms so your customer support team must be well-equipped to handle all kinds of comments in the best way possible. Creating an internal system of guidelines and standard operating procedures can be very helpful. Create specific guidelines, along with templates, for the customer service team and brief your team on how they are supposed to handle every kind of request they may receive. To create these templates and guidelines, go through the social media comments for your brand or your competitors to get a fair idea of what type of issues your team should expect, and what type of responses are the best fit for each type of query. Having an internal system will help you build a strong, positive, online reputation for your brand and your team will handle requests more quickly and efficiently. 

Take conversations off social media

Not all conversations are meant to be open to the public – you must ensure that you educate your team on this so that they can take the conversations to a private platform. For example, sometimes you may need the customer’s personal information for the resolution of a complaint; it’s not wise to ask for personal information on public platforms. Your team should make the conversation private by connecting through private direct messages or emails. Sometimes customer support conversations may get heated and, again, it’s better not to resolve these issues on public platforms. Train your team to make conversations like this private, and ensure that the customer’s service request is resolved. 

Respond to every feedback and comment that you receive

Social media is an important customer service channel because it instils confidence in your customers – as well as those people who have the potential to turn into your customers – so if your team doesn’t respond to comments two groups of customers could start to perceive your brand in a negative light. 

Track important metrics

It is vital that you measure and track the customer service offered by your brand on social media. Tracking and measuring important metrics will help you to consistently improve your customer service and lead to better customer retention, increased customer loyalty, and higher brand awareness. You can start by identifying key performance indicators that will help you keep track of your customer service efforts on social media platforms – common metrics you can use are our average response time, number of resolved issues, response rate, first contact resolution, customer retention rate and customer churn. 

Consider AI chatbots

AI chatbots can respond to customer service responses 24/7, so you do not have to worry about slower response times – chatbots can even offer resolutions to common FAQs and complaints that are easy to resolve. For complex questions, the chatbot can provide the initial acknowledgement so that the customer is at ease and knows that your team is working on resolving the issue.