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5 tips to leverage social media for outstanding customer service

by | Jan 18, 2021 | Public Relations

Customer service today is not what we knew a few years ago. Today, no one has the patience to send customer service emails or dial customer support numbers. Think about it—when was the last time you did so?

Using social media for customer service is not new. But the trend is increasing with the increased use of social media.

According to Conversocial, 54 percent of customers prefer social media for customer service over emails and phone calls. This is a win for businesses as well because resolving a customer service issue on social media is 83 percent cheaper than through a call center intervention.

5 tips to leverage social media for outstanding customer service

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Wondering how to leverage social media the right way to offer premium customer service? We’ve got you covered with this guide. Read on if you want to learn some tips to offer customer service on social media.

1. Focus on the right channels

For getting your business’s online reputation right, it is vital for you to understand and analyze your customer persona.

All your strategies will stem from the data you have collected about your persona. You can also find the right social media channels for customer service by collecting data on your persona.

For example, if your audience mostly hangs out on Twitter and Instagram, then these are the channels that you must focus on.

You can pick 2 to 3 channels that are predominantly used by your target audience. You can create customer service social media handles on these social media platforms.

2. Respond quickly

Did you know that 60 percent of customers who complain about your products or services on social media expect a response within an hour?!

5 tips to leverage social media for outstanding customer service

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If you fail to respond quickly, then you should be prepared for negative reviews and a bad reputation coming your way. Hence, it is important to be prompt with your responses, especially for the negative ones.

You should try to monitor your social media handles and any branded hashtags continuously. For customers complaining through DMs, you can set up automated responses using bots.

Even if you cannot resolve the issue immediately, you should at least try to send out a quick response saying that you are looking into their complaint.

3. Monitor conversations and be proactive

When it comes to using social media as a customer service channel, having a proactive approach will yield the best results.

If you just remain reactive and wait for issues to escalate, then your brand’s reputation might get hurt on popular social media channels.

A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool such as SuperOffice can be extremely powerful for managing all your social media customer service activities from a commonplace.

Your customers may interact and post complaints on various social media platforms. In such cases, it is not a wise thing to start fresh conversations on each platform.

The tool will help you manage all the customer’s previous conversations and the other details such as purchase history on a well-organized platform. Thus you can have a proactive approach to customer service. Offering such outstanding customer service will completely transform the way customers perceive your brand. Soon, you’ll start to notice increased customer retention and loyalty.

4. Tailor your tone

When handling customer service, it is important to watch your tone. While you can get away with a slightly rude tone on a phone conversation, you cannot risk the same things on social media.

On social media, everything is out for the public to watch. Hence, you should take extra care about how you are communicating with your customers.

If you blame your customers, lack an apologizing tone, or use a hurtful tone, then your online reputation will be damaged for good. This will affect your conversion rates and may even lead to increased customer churn.

5. Know when to take the matter offline

Sometimes, a customer service conversation might be unnecessarily prolonged on social media platforms. This might leave your audience irritated and is not the best thing to do.

Remember that using social media as a customer service channel means that you can use the platform as an initial conversation starter on customer service queries.

It doesn’t necessarily mean that you should have your entire conversation on the social media channel.

If you see that the resolution of the issue at hand will have lots of back and forth conversation, try to take the conversation offline on an email or a phone call.

Also, make sure that you drop a comment on the social media thread if the initial conversion was open to the public.

Over to you

Social media channels are increasingly gaining popularity as customer service channels. This is mainly because social media has made customer support much more straightforward and accessible to customers.

The use of social media has been a boon for businesses because the expense has drastically reduced. However, since all your complaints and conversations are open to the public, things can go sideways real quick.

Hence, it is super-important to monitor and be careful with your customer service strategy. The tips provided here will be effective for the same. So, use these tips and start implementing your customer service strategies on social media channels.

Gaurav Belani
Gaurav Belani is Senior SEO & Content Marketing Analyst at Growfusely.

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