How to use Social Media for Customer Services 2024?

How To Use Social Media For Customer Services 2024?

Customer service refers to helping solve a customer’s query or complaint about a particular product or service. Social media customer service refers to engaging and assisting customers on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Customers are gradually moving away from traditional customer service channels such as email and phone. They no longer want to write or send emails explaining their problems or wait for a long time to speak to a support agent over the phone. They demand immediate responses and prompt action. So social media channels like Twitter and Facebook give customers the comfort of timely replies in a personal and empathetic tone. So offering social media customer service is a ‘must’ for improving customer experience.

These Social media platforms allow for immediate, short, and quick communication, which enables their queries or complaints to be resolved promptly. This in turn encourages brands to build a presence on social media. Hearing what your customers say about you on social media is often a useful tool to have In the customer services department in order to ensure your brand retains a positive name out there in the marketplace.

Whilst marketing efforts may help to drive traffic to social media sites, it is important to stay ahead of your competition and focus on where else your potential customers may already be socialising. Most companies use Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest as their main target areas.  SMEs and larger companies may also find that their customers use Google My Business, LinkedIn, and Snapchat to name but a few, to gain extra business.

Social Media for Customer Services sites like Facebook and Twitter have evolved to become more prominent platforms on which to plug and advertise products. They are also valid and important channels through which consumers look to receive customer comments and feedback too.

Social Media responses are generally public. This means that everyone can see how a company is dealing with a customer issue. Any bad interactions can result in catching public attention quickly which can then go viral. Establishing a positive presence on social media can also result in positive word-of-mouth. This reach can help in building brand awareness and earning your prospects’ trust.  So it is important for these companies to respond quickly and efficiently.

Whenever possible they need to deal with these queries on the same method of correspondence as customers don’t like being asked to switch channels such as email or phone to resolve their queries. For these consumers, the thought of finding a customer service telephone number and waiting on hold for half an hour or of sending an email and waiting hours for a response is probably going to look cumbersome, slow, and inefficient.

Customer service via social media is actually the closest a company that doesn’t have direct face-to-face customer interaction can get to providing outstanding service and removing known customer annoyances like keypad menus for customer service phones.

Best practices for social media customer service

Develop a social media customer service policy

Customer service policies ensure all employees are on an equivalent page when addressing dissatisfied customers or any questions and concerns customers may need.

This is often especially important if you are using social media for customer support purposes. You’ll be wanting to make a separate social media customer service policy for your team in order that your efforts are reliable and consistent.

Respond as early as possible

As previously mentioned, every response you send can be viewed not only by the customer who raised the request but also by other customers. So acknowledge all comments, posts, and mentions as soon as possible and make sure you resolve everything within the acceptable time frame.

Showcase your brand’s personality

Social media is where you get to build your brand’s presence organically, so ensure your customers are given something to remember you by.

Don’t take all conversations to Direct Message (DM)

Responding to all posts or questions with a generic response that says ‘sorry you are experiencing this problem, please DM us with more details is not ideal. As you could seem to be getting away from the public eye. Only do this only if you are requesting personal information. However, if it is a bug or something still in your system, then there’s no harm in being direct. This way, you can also field further questions around this.

Decide your approach based on the situation

Bigger issues such as an outage of your website, or app could hit many customers at the same time, leading to an increase in repetitive social mentions. Replying with the same message on every tweet or post could make you sound robotic and take a toll on your customer service team. The best way to keep your customers informed is by sharing period updates publicly.