Social media customer service: Tips and tools to do it right - The Crowdfire blog

Over time, the use of social media sites has increased. More businesses are leveraging social media sites to grow their customer base and boost relationship marketing. Not only do businesses need new customers, but also retain the previous ones.

Whether you are an established company or startup, implement the right social media marketing strategies. If you are not sure how to do this, consult a reliable startup marketing company.

If your company is active on social media networks, invest in great customer service for proper customer engagement.

When customers approach your company, they would want to get a good reception, and if they don’t get that, they can easily be disappointed and look for an alternative. It’s your competitor’s lucky day!

The use of social media sites has increased to up to 58.4% of the world’s population. That’s an opportunity to seize — social media marketing. However, adults may be more susceptible to using specific social media sitesthan the younger generations.

According to research by Statista, people approximately use 2 ½ hours per day messaging and on social media networks.

As of October 2020, there were approximately 4.08 billion social media users worldwide. Thereby, social media platforms would be a perfect place to capture people’s attention in a glimpse.

Facebook is one of the most popular social media platforms with about 2.74 billion active users worldwide. It’s closely followed by YouTube, WhatsApp messaging app, Instagram, WeChat, TikTok, Snapchat, Telegram, Twitter, and other social media platforms.

According to Buffer 2019, 57% of brands believed that social media marketing was effective with most leveraging on Facebook.

They proceeded to note that more than 84% of respondents were willing to use influencer marketing to boost their businesses. In 2020, more than 83 % of marketers and brands used social media sites to increase their sales.

According to Forbes, 2018, customer experience plays a big role in promoting brands. That’s why it is important to embrace the different social media platforms based on your target audience.

Most customers don’t care whether you are omnichannel or multichannel, they just want to interact with your brand. So, what are you waiting for?

People use social media platforms to get updates and get their concerns or questions answered. According to McKinsey Company research, businesses that respond to customer queries tend to retain customers more than those that are unresponsive.

Customer service on social media sites is using reliable social tools to resolve customer queries, questions, or concerns. Provide the flexibility for customers to reach you through the social media pages that they readily use.

According to Smart Insights, 63 % of customers prefer businesses offering support through their social media channels. As a business, you need to make your customers feel that they are a priority.

Unfortunately, the kind of rush in the world has made some customers impatient. Thereby, instead of waiting to speak to an agent, they prefer venting their frustrations on social media. Don’t let your company be a victim, invest in good customer service on social media.

Customer service on social media can also include providing educational materials, brand awareness, brand engagement, and personalized services.

When you monitor the social conversation in your niche or industry, you will be able to identify popular creators and leaders that you can connect with. They can help to influence your customers.

Strive to monitor the social media channels and any brand mentions to revert. Also, engage with your customers to see what they need and get valuable feedback from them. Listening to customers’ demands, requests and queries should be your unique selling point.

You can use some social media monitoring tools to check all your pages. You also need to have reliable social media managers and customer service support to help make that possible. They should promptly respond to any queries or conversations to calm the situation and make every customer feel important.

Monitor what your other business competitors are doing. Check how they partake in social media activities, how they handle situations, their diversity, the information they pass online, and their engagement.

In social media interactions, you can identify your brand’s enthusiasts and fans. Find ways in which you can acknowledge and nurture them. They can even be part of your influencer marketing campaigns. Just utilize the right keywords in your posts to identify them.

Each of your social media goals needs a metric. For example, you may want to increase conversions through your social media pages; you can decide to use influencers, ads, posts, and much more.

You can then use suitable metrics to identify the progress. If you are a startup, consider a marketing agency for startups to help you start.

The metrics can help you determine customer satisfaction and a campaign’s impact. Try and closely analyze how the customers rate how you resolve their issues.

A good rating requires a thank you, a poor rating should prompt you to know why. You can use social media tools to escalate your customer service and save on time and money.

You should also measure through inbound volume. This is the form in which customers come to your business through meaningful content that they come across. To achieve this, your business needs to provide good and valuable information that will capture customers’ attention.

Thereby, try and send questions to customers after purchase for any other repeat business transactions.

One great lead generation service is outbound calls to find people interested in your services. Therefore, this can be a metric for determining whether your customers love your products. Businesses nowadays are using a contact center AI platform that tracks, records, and transcribes your calls for a better understanding of why calls are getting rejected.

You need to monitor all the call issues. Try and compare how many messages and likes are gotten as compared to emails and phone calls.

This is a metric used in customer experience programs to measure customer loyalty. It measures customers’ experience to predict the growth of the business.

This refers to the percentage of IT incidents resolved with the SLA parameters. This includes time, cost, workflow priority, and much more. In this, you need to have particular goals on what your company wants to achieve.

One major rule is to always respond to your customer’s comments. Having responsive customer service shows that you care about your audience.

If a customer comes to you and doesn’t get the required help quickly. It’s more likely that they will move to your business competitor.

Unfortunately, customer support may not be on 24/7, but you can try to respond quickly during office hours. Also, make your customer support availability information visible to prevent disappointing customers.

Just like Facebook Messenger you can have automated response messages for your away times. The acknowledgment matters.

Strive to monitor all mentions, comments, and responses. All the conversations matter even if they don’t reach you directly.

Some people even post messages on your business online without tagging. However, some may require a response. Therefore, do proper monitoring.

Even if you have a social media manager or managers. You will find that the customer service team is more likely to address the client’s questions better and faster. Therefore, consider having a dedicated support team for that.

There should be a separate social media support account. Remember to provide that handle on your official business page for clarification.

When a company has many followers, happy comments, and responses, it means that the customers are satisfied. Therefore, you can try to use data analytics software to analyze customer data. You can even share your social media strides and success with your audience.

This primarily depends on the goal of your business. You need to test a social media platform before actually maximizing it. Is your target audience active on the platform? What age group seems to be engaging in the platform?

For example, LinkedIn can be ideal for businesses looking to hire or promote their services. While Instagram would be perfect for selling goods, products, and some tangible services.

Certain issues can be solved publicly, while in some cases, you may need to send a private message to the person.

Subsequently, you may find that the issue is complex, and it may require you to send an email or make a call. In the case that someone wants a specialized business quote, consider redirecting them to your website or send an email with all the needed information.

You can also consider having a chatbot that is fed with frequently asked questions. Therefore, customers can get automated responses fast. However, still provide an option to speak to an agent or leave a message and get a reply through email.

On social media platforms, you need to write a proper bio that illustrates the use of the account. If you have a separate “help account”, provide its account handle in the bio. Also, write about the specific office hours to ensure customers don’t feel disappointed if they don’t get a response fast.

Additionally, have clear expectations of what you would want to achieve through the different social media places, and your target audience.

The social voice and tone in the responses matters in customer support. Also, research the length of the message that you can write on the different platforms. For example, Twitter would require just short responses. On Facebook, you can write longer ones.

Your tone should match the client. For example, let’s say they use emoticons or other symbols. If they write in a fluent language, you might as well reciprocate the same.

If they feel frustrated try to cool them down and assure them that it will be okay. You can check their profiles to understand what kind of person they are.

If you have different social media platforms, you need to practice smooth channel switching. Customers use multiple channels to connect with a brand. Therefore, your business team needs to be knowledgeable about this.

The customer’s expectations will increase with time, and your team needs to know how to handle that by offering multiple places for customers to engage with your brand.

The customers would want to get a good experience while engaging with you on different platforms. Therefore, leverage on making each customer feel comfortable. Most customers require consistent responses from different social media channels. Therefore, see to that.

Social media platforms are getting popular with each passing day. You can use that to your advantage to boost your business and get more sales. Whether you are an established company or startup, social media management is crucial for your business.

All the best as you strive to boost your social media customer service. You will surely increase your sales over time. Invest in good customer service!