Modern customers have become accustomed to convenience. They can find, review, and purchase what they’re looking for with a few swift clicks of the mouse. And when it comes to customer service, they expect similar levels of speed and efficiency.
These days, when customers want to voice a complaint, ask a question, or leave a positive review, it’s unlikely they’re going to pick up the phone. Instead, the first place they head is usually a brand’s website or social media channels.
Platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn are no longer just used for catching up with friends and networking, they’ve become incredibly useful tools for businesses to keep in touch with their audience, and this extends to customer service too.
The right approach to digital customer service can help you strengthen your connections on social media while keeping customers happy and building loyalty along the way. Let’s take a closer look.
Why Digital Customer Service on Social Media Matters
Though there are many, here are some of the most compelling reasons why digital customer service on social media is so crucial:
- Speed of Response: Nowadays, customers are more impatient than ever and they expect fast replies to their questions or issues.
If you don’t have a digital customer service strategy in place, and you’re just relying on your social media team to pick up and respond to queries when they can, these slow responses can infuriate customers and damage your brand’s reputation.
- Public Nature of Social Media: The interactions you have with your customers via social media are often public, leaving brands with nowhere to hide. Having a disgruntled customer derailing the comments on your latest post with negative feedback can be every marketer’s worst nightmare.
On the flip side, if you’re seen to be responding to questions, comments, or complaints on your feed quickly and positively, it provides the perfect platform to show off your great customer service.
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- Direct Connection: Whether you’re an idle scroller or someone who actively engages on social media, most of us have at least some interaction with it regularly. This makes social media one of the most direct ways you can connect with your customers.
Using your social channels to quickly respond to comments, answer questions or resolve issues gives you the chance to easily engage with your customers in real-time, without making them wait for an email response or sit in a hold queue to speak to someone on the phone.
- Building Relationships: Social media customer service isn’t just about responding to complaints or resolving issues, it’s also a great place to build and keep long-term relationships with your audience.
By interacting regularly with your customers via social media with personalized and thoughtful responses, you can go from being a faceless business to a trusted friend—turning casual followers into loyal advocates.
Key Digital Customer Service Strategies for Social Media
Using digital customer service to strengthen relationships over social media requires a balance of speedy problem-solving with more long-term relationship-building. To get started, here are some surefire tactics that will help.
1. Timely Responses to Customer Inquiries
Speed is everything when it comes to social media customer service. When customers contact a brand with a question or to report a problem, they expect a response, and they want that response ASAP.
The longer they are waiting around for a reply, the more likely they are to become frustrated, and in the worst-case scenario that could mean giving up on you and switching to a competitor.
To meet this demand for fast response times:
- Monitor your social media channels continuously: Using dedicated tools can help track comments, mentions, and messages across multiple platforms in real-time.
- Set response time goals: Setting internal goals to respond to customers’ queries, for instance, responding to all customer queries within one hour, can help to make sure all queries are dealt with promptly and nothing slips between the cracks when teams are busy.
- Rely on automated responses when needed: Though personalization plays an important role, automating an acknowledgment message can prevent customers from feeling ignored while waiting for a more detailed response.
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2. Provide Omnichannel Support
Social media is just one of the many ways your customers connect with your brand. They might also use other channels, such as email, chat, phone, etc., depending on the nature of their query or their personal preferences.
If you want to make sure you’re providing a consistently high level of customer service, then you need to adopt an omnichannel customer support strategy as part of your business transformation process. That means no matter where or how a customer contacts you, they will experience the same level of service.
- Keep it Connected: Using a CRM system helps you track all customer interactions in one place, whether they’re on Twitter, Facebook, or your website’s live chat. This way, your support team always has the background they need to respond quickly and personally.
- Speak with One Voice: Don’t ignore the power of consistency—messaging should be consistent across all channels. For example, when a customer is being told one thing on social media but then gets a different story from an email representative, it can create confusion and frustration.
3. Leverage Chatbots for Immediate Assistance
While they shouldn’t be used as a complete substitute for your customer service team, Chatbots powered by artificial intelligence (AI) can play a useful role in supporting social media customer service.
The great thing about these handy virtual assistants is that they never need to eat, sleep, or take a break. That means they can be on call 24/7 to immediately answer simple questions or offer support to your customers.
They can be especially useful for providing instant responses outside of business hours, or for managing a high volume of messages.
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Some key advantages of using chatbots include:
- 24/7 Availability: Unlike human agents, virtual agents are available around the clock, meaning that customers can get help whenever they need it, even if it’s outside of your normal operating hours.
- Handling Simple Queries: Bots can deal with basic issues for you, like order tracking or password resets, freeing up human agents to focus their time on answering more complex queries.
- Personalization: Modern-day chatbots have come a long way. They can now utilize AI to produce personalized responses, creating a more customized and engaging experience for customers.
However, it’s essential to strike the right balance. While chatbots can add efficiency, the human touch is still necessary for more complex or emotional issues. Always ensure that customers have the option to escalate queries to a human representative.
4. Personalize Interactions
Sure, a basic, generic response might solve a customer’s problem and allow you to tick their query off your to-do list, but it’s probably not going to make them feel very valued or engaged with your brand.
Making the extra effort to work on your personalization strategies to add those personal touches to your communication, however, could make all the difference in turning them from a passive shopper to a loyal supporter of your brand. It shows them that they are important and valuable customers, not just another order number.
Here are a few easy ways to add a personal touch to your social media responses and make every interaction count:
- Use their name: Something as simple as making the effort to address customers by their name in replies can make a conversation feel more warm and personal.
- Recognize their history: Mentioning a customer’s past interactions or purchases shows you’re paying attention and value their ongoing relationship with your brand.
- Adapt your tone: Adjust your tone to fit the platform and the customer. For example, a casual, friendly vibe might suit Instagram, while a more professional tone is better for LinkedIn.
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5. Handle Complaints with Empathy and Transparency
The nature of social media can be both a blessing and a curse—on the one hand, it’s a great platform for positive interactions, but at the same time, it’s also a space where disgruntled customers can turn to publicly air their grievances. If you don’t handle those complaints quickly and in the right way, they can easily blow up and start to harm your reputation.
Here’s how to turn tricky situations into positive experiences and transform your business through effective customer service:
- Respond quickly: It can be tempting to park a customer’s complaint until you have a solution to their problem, but this is the worst thing you can do. Don’t wait until you have all the answers—acknowledge the issue right away. Let the customer know you’re on it and will provide more information soon.
- Show empathy: A lot of the time, frustrated customers just need to feel heard. Even if the problem isn’t directly your fault, or their complaint isn’t entirely justified, being understanding and showing a little compassion in your response can go a long way to calming things down.
- Take it private: Nobody wants to get into a public battle with a customer. If the issue is complicated or sensitive, the best approach is to offer to move the conversation to a private message, email, or phone call. This way, you can deal with the matter without a public audience, and get into more detailed problem-solving in a one-to-one conversation.
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6. Create a Dedicated Social Media Support Team
As more customers turn to social media for support, you’ll need to consider having a dedicated team to manage these interactions.
Social media moves fast and customers can be demanding. If you rely on your general customer service team to juggle real-time responses alongside their other daily tasks, you could start slipping on response times or missing queries.
Here’s why you should have a dedicated social media customer service team:
- Expert Knowledge: A general customer service team might not be completely au fait with the nuances and vibe of each social media platform. A dedicated team can be trained specifically for the channels they manage, so they can engage, respond, and handle queries with the right tone and method of response.
- Quicker Responses: When you have a team that’s only focused on social media, they’re not juggling other priorities or responsibilities, meaning they can reply to customer questions much faster.
- Crisis Management: If you find yourself in the depths of a tricky PR situation or dealing with something like a product recall, a specialized team is better prepared to handle the situation across social media calmly and strategically.
With an enterprise collaboration strategy in place, this team can easily loop in other departments who are working on resolving the issue, keeping everyone on the same page.
7. Measure and Optimize Your Social Media Customer Service Efforts
Customer satisfaction is likely pretty high on your list of priorities, so if you want to know how well your digital customer service on social media is going, it’s important to track some key metrics. These will give you a benchmark to measure your performance against and see where you might need to make any changes.
Here are some KPIs you should keep an eye on:
- Response Time: How quickly are you managing to get back to customers who have questions or complaints? Track your average response time, with the aim of seeing it reduce over time.
- Resolution Time: It’s important to respond to customers quickly, but you also need to check how long it’s taking you to actually resolve any issues in full. The faster you can solve their problems, the happier your customers will be!
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- Customer Satisfaction (CSAT): Once you’ve resolved their issue, you can ask customers directly for their feedback or use surveys to see how satisfied they are with the help they received.
- First Contact Resolution (FCR): This shows the percentage of problems solved in one interaction. You should be aiming for a high FCR, which should mean your team is working efficiently without too much back and forth.
- Sentiment Analysis: Keep track of the overall tone of customer interactions. Are people generally talking positively about your brand? You can use specific brand monitoring tools to measure this.
If you’re collecting data from multiple sources, consider using an IPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service) solution, which can connect up your social media, CRM, and analytics tools so that you can bring together and analyze all your data from customer interactions in one place.
Effective Digital Customer Service
With the average person spending over 2 hours a day on social media, having a strong digital customer service strategy in place isn’t just a nice-to-have anymore—it’s a must-do for any business that wants to provide the best experience for today’s customers.
Getting it right can turn your social media channels from a passive marketing tactic into a dynamic brand loyalty powerhouse. You’ll see the rewards go beyond just happy customers; it can give your brand’s reputation a healthy boost, keep customers coming back, and ultimately set you up for success in a competitive market.