Customer Service in Social Media: Best Practices

How often do your customers complain to you over social media? It is estimated that about 80% of the customers use social media to communicate with brands. The good news is that there are much less (about 35%) consumers complaining about bad customer service over social media than those (53%) who commend brands on their good customer service. 

Of course, to get your customers to commend you on excellent customer service you as a brand must learn to provide excellent customer service — it is as easy as this. And communication with your customers via the social media is one of the steps you must take to ensure that you have a great engagement with your customer base and that your customers have all the reasons to leave great feedback. 

Moreover, customer service over social media has the potential to boost your business performance overall and can improve your brand exposure. 

So, social media and customer service — what are the ground rules?

The Effect of an Excellent Social Media Customer Service

Businesses that implement social media to communicate with their customers found that it can boost their brand awareness, improve their marketing campaigns and help them improve the communication with their customers by being closer to their needs. As a result, great customer service can lead to:

• 😃 Perfected ad and marketing campaigns
  Choosing what ad and marketing campaigns to focus on is quite a difficult task. There are so many aspects and settings that it is easy to get lost in them. Here the key to a successful campaign is understanding your target and primary audience and launching the campaigns that will suit all their needs and wants. In other words, communication with your customers through social media and providing them with customer service will help you optimize all your advertisement and marketing campaigns and, as a result, you will reach the audience you need. 
• 🔄 Decrease in customer churn
  Communicating with the customers, setting up ad campaigns that suit them and personalizing ad campaigns to satisfy their needs all point to you as a caring vendor who is ready to listen to their customers and even go the extra mile to satisfy them. As a result, you form a great competitive advantage and a certain image around yourself. An image that will surely help you decrease your customer churn and make more customers eligible for retention. 
• 🔛 Possibility to better manage your supply-demand numbers
  Activity of the customers on your social media pages can easily reflect their demands. It is clear that when customers constantly ask about a certain product or a certain service, it means that it is going to see more demand than other products and that its stock must be filled more. With this, your customers unknowingly help you manage your stock, which will surely result in a better customer experience as you will be able to better satisfy their needs. All because of social media communication. 
• 🤝 Faster development of your brand and your customer relations
  Social media is one of the most popular means of communication — 54% of customers prefer to conduct customer service communication over social media rather than over the phone or email. The customers who write to your brand via you Facebook or Instagram pages expect fast answers. In fact, 42% of the customers expect to be answered within 1 hour from their inquiry. Any longer and customer satisfaction KPI can fall dramatically. Of course, fast responses and swift comments, especially when they hit the spot and answer the question precisely, only improve your brand exposure and will surely improve your reputation within your customer base. 
• ✅ The possibility to resolve customer tickets faster
  What is the main advantage of customer service via social media? It is instantaneous. You get messages and questions in seconds and can answer them just as fast, provided that you have the information to answer them with. This way you resolve customer tickets faster. As a result, you do not get a pile-up of unanswered questions and unaddressed issues. Of course, to make sure that you can 100% deal with the flow of the tickets, you need a sufficient number of customer service consultants and a team that can be scaled fast if needed. 

Social Media Customer Service: Best Practices

Today’s customers are not that easy to impress. They need to see excellent service and get the goods of the highest quality in order to even consider taking their time to write a good testimonial or reach out to your team to thank them for a job well done. 

That is why we have to acknowledge the best practices in social media customer service and to try and implement as many of them as we can into our every-day operations. 

What are the best demonstrations of excellent customer service in social media?

1. 🚅 Answer as fast as possible

As we already mentioned before, a little less than half of your customers expect to be answered within an hour of their inquiry. This means that the faster you answer — the better. After all, customers rarely stay silent about a negligible business. 52% tell about it to their friends and family which can cost a business several customers, 54% will escalate to the business’ manager to resolve their issues and 56% will just stop doing business with the company altogether. 

In reality, it is simpler for your business to set up the processes in a way that is going to facilitate fast and correct responses. 

2. 🙋 Respond to absolutely everything

Messages, comments, mentions, tags — all of these are the forms that your customers communicate with your brand through. And you can’t afford to ignore even one of them. You have to make sure that you cover them all and that absolutely everything gets replied to. This way you are not only never going to miss messages and questions from your customers but will also come across as a friendly brand that can be easily reached and communicated with.

3. 🔍 Be transparent with your company information 

What does your company information say? Does it have all the necessary contacts? Will your customers get everything they need from it? If the answer to at least one of these questions is no, then you really must rethink your strategy here. Your company information, address, telephone and if possible a POC should not only be up-to-date, they should be easy-to-find as well. This way you are showing your customers that you have nothing to hide and that you are going to be a reliable vendor and partner for years to come. 

4. 📥 Monitor customer engagement

There is a wide variety of tools that help you monitor customer engagement level in your social media pages. Use them. Understand when your customers are the most active and what calls for the most reaction from them. This way you will know everything about your customers and their preferences. It will also influence your overall business performance as you will be able to address  the processes as they go. 

5. 👥 Hire the best customer service team

Of course, to provide the best customer service, you have to hire the best customer service team. That is where outsourced solutions come in handy as they provide the needed expertise and can fully replace an in-house team that needs to be maintained and supported. The best decision here is to outsource your customer service team to SupportYourApp — a customer support provider who has been in the market for a decade and will be glad to provide expertise for the businesses that need to improve customer service in social media.

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Want to outsource your social media customer support?

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SupportYourApp and Social Media Customer Service — Your Customers Are Our Priority

The team of SupportYourApp understands the importance of communication with your customers in social media. We know that those ready to purchase from you need and deserve the best service. That is why when it comes to social media, we strive to provide the best communication. We onboard and train our teams with a customer-centric approach in mind. This means that we are never going to leave your customers without a reply and will always satisfy their needs. 

Social media is one of the cornerstones of modern customer experience. And we are ready to do everything we can in order to make it one of the cornerstones of your business success. Because SupportYourApp cares about you and your customers. 

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