As more and more customers turn to Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, and other social channels to ask questions or make complaints, keeping up with customer service is no easy task. Social customer service can be especially complicated for small brands, since customer expectations don’t adjust for the size of your customer service team.
Since the Geben social media team deals with community engagement every day, I turned to them to share quick hacks you can use to better integrate social customer service into your daily work routine.
1. Use a Monitoring Hub to Track Social Activity
Through Hootsuite, you can set up searches for hashtags and keywords relevant to your brand. Think through the words and phrases your audience is using to talk about your industry. You’ll also want to set up searches for variations of your brand name in case your audience is talking about you without actually tagging your handle.
2. Set Reminders to Engage With Your Community
When community management isn’t your full-time job,it can be tough to prioritize and dedicate enough time to actively monitor and interact with your community on social. Set reminders or use quick fifteen minute calendar blocks a few times per day to make community engagement a habit, making sure even during the busiest days you don’t go radio-silent on social.
During these blocks, refer back to your monitoring hubs to quickly check in with your community, respond to any new questions or mentions, and engage with your followers.
3. Use Private Twitter Lists to Track Your Most Loyal Advocates
If you have a core of followers who are consistently interacting with your brand and advocating on your behalf to others, add them to a private Twitter list. This allows you to easily catch up on their day-to-day posts and find ways to organically interact, further strengthening the relationship without being attached to your feed 24/7.
4. Set Up Phone Alerts For Your Social Media Apps
Did you know 40% of customers who complain on social expect a response within one hour? Your audience expects quick, accurate responses when they reach out via social, especially is something is wrong. Set alerts on your phone to make sure you catch customer service questions quickly and respond in real-time.
5. Take a Team Approach to Social Customer Service
Customer service is a 24/7 job. When you’re managing all on your own, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed or to accidentally miss something because you were off-the-grid for the weekend. To give yourself some sanity without disappointing your customers, take a team approach to make sure all your bases are covered. For your team, that might look like dividing up channels, or scheduling “on call” nights or weekends so you always know who will be addressing any issues that come up.
6. Outsource to Save Time and Money
At Geben, because we have a whole social media team, we’re able to tag team community management and monitoring for our clients. We actively monitor relevant hashtags and keywords consistently throughout the day, and because we work with brands in a variety of different industries, we have a close eye on a wide-range of trends and hashtags, allowing us to predict trends or events that may impact your brand on social.
I think small brands are often surprised to find that outsourcing social customer service can be more affordable than they might think. Because we’re managing social media for several clients, what may feel like a full time job for you takes our team significantly less time per small client.
Interested in outsourcing social customer service for your brand? Email me and let’s discuss!
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