Social Media Customer Service
Social Media has proved out to be an essential marketing tool for all types of businesses. Building relationships with potential customers has become a vital element for a brand’s success in today’s time.
Gone are the days when people used to give word of mouth feedback; the role of social media has changed every people’s life and business sector.
The vital role of social media is it positively influences sales and brings out brand loyalty and connection.
Earlier, it was used for personal use and to maintain personal interactions, but it has become a crucial tool to create a community around brands with its ever-growing popularity.
However, in today’s time, they are not just limited to feedback and interactions, but the role of social media in customer service is another major revolution.
And if they are unable to manage social media presence, it can damage your brand and lose out on your potential paying customers.
Thus, a company looking to transform its business should maintain flawless customer service. Developing a good and proper social media customer service policy is very essential.
There are several ways to leverage social media in customer service to fuel your business growth. So let’s get started.
Table of Contents
Importance of social media in customer service
Service plays a vital role in maintaining a reputation and building a healthy relationship with your customers. But if played in the wrong manner, it can cause a major effect on your brand.
Here’s a quote by Tony Hsieh saying
Customer service shouldn’t just be a department, it should be the entire company
In today’s modern digital world, using social media for customer service can bring immense benefit to your brand. Before making the social media customer service policy, one should know all the benefits of this customer service. Let’s look at few essential benefits of using social media as customer service:
1. Builds emotional connection
Social media has brought the entire process of support systems to one place. Nowadays, customers are raising a complaint on several social platforms, rather than connecting with the support team to solve their queries.
Social media helps people to interact with their brand easily to raise any queries of a particular brand. And when your staff responds to them in quick time, it drives brand engagement. This helps to uplift your brand and creates brand loyalty for your customers. In addition, when your customers interact with your brand on several available social channels, it boosts your image as a socially conscious brand and builds an emotional connection with your customers.
2. Additional channels
Providing additional channels to your customers will help you to drive better engagement from them. Different social media platforms cater to different customer segments.
Through LinkedIn, you’ll be serving professional customers. Through Facebook, you’ll be serving your personal network. Through Instagram, you’ll be serving the younger audience. One should develop a good social media customer service team that understands each of these platforms and responds them accordingly.
With the rising trend in social media usage, it would prove out to be effective and worthy if customer support shifts to these platforms. You can also use one of the best social media management tools like Locobuzz that will help you get deeper insights and visibility on social media with its great set of features.
3. It helps to strategize your marketing efforts
By using social media as customer service, you can easily strategize your marketing efforts. A good social media customer service team is essential for improving marketing. When several consumers talk about a specific problem on social media, your answer becomes an advertisement for your product.
Just Think about it. Anyone tracing the comments on your product will keep a check on your niche. And when they glance at your answer, it helps them to know your product better.
Thus, it’s essential to answer people’s problems by using social media as an effective solution.
How can you use social media as a customer service?
A good social media customer service policy can help you solve your customer’s problems and gain a brand reputation. Here are some essential strategies that you can use social media as a customer service tool:
1. Build relationship with your customers
Several businesses use social media to increase brand awareness and for self-promotion. However, they don’t think about their customers nor reply to their comments or tweet back to the customers.
Instead of following other business practices, use social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram as a powerful tool to build a relationship by engaging in conversation.According to Convince & Convert:
42 Percent of Consumers Complaining in Social Media Expect 60 Minute Response Time
2. Put efforts on creating a customer advocate base
Delivering a positive experience to the customers is a primary task of all businesses. If a customer goes through a bad experience, they will likely leave a negative review online.
In this case, you should provide excellent customer service to create a strong and loyal customer base to advocate your brand if a customer has something negative to say.3. Respond to all your customers
When you respond to a complaint or negative review to the customer, you must closely read and respond to what the customer is trying to say about your brand. You should have a good social media customer service team who understands and reacts in proper way.
Paying attention to your customer’s complaint is vital, and lack of attractiveness contributes to a poor response, which negatively impacts your brand. While no response will also be called a “poor response.”
Frank Eliason, Global Director Client Experience, Citi says
Truly listening is hearing the needs of the customer, understanding those needs, and making sure the company recognizes the opportunity they present.
One positive response with a thank you or emoji can significantly impact as it helps them know that your brand is listening and responding.
The primary goal of your brand should be to assure all your potential customers, followers that you are active on all social media platforms and responding to all your customers.4. Set up a different account for customer service support
Complaints can be received from various social platforms. One should have a separate social media customer service support for such complaints. Nowadays, every business has a different social media account, especially for customer service support.
For example:
Netflix has a normal account named “@netflix,” while their customer service account is named “@netflix_help.”
This helps the business identify and focus on all customer’s problems and helps your customer service team focus on solving issues quickly.
Make sure to include a link in your main account’s bio to direct customers for support.
Also, respond to every customer service complaint or message from your social account even if the customer contacted the wrong one. Responding to every customer message will show how you address their requests and reply politely.
How locobuzz can help you in social media customer service?
By adding Locobuzz platform in your social media customer service support, it will help you monitor online conversations on multiple channels by using a single interface.
The platform is especially designed to help you save crucial time, strategise communications, and reduce overall costs. They even have automated customer service to expand your operations without adding headcounts.
With its 360-degree view feature it allows you to easily connect your sources of customer data with our platform. The best part in which Locobuzz will help you is its 24/7 proactive support with collaborative problem solving.
Develop a social media customer service policy
Customer service policies will ensure that everyone is on the same page when dealing with unhappy customers, or any other questions or concerns that customers may have. This is crucial in the case of using social media to support customer reasons. You’ll need to develop an individual social media customer service policy for your staff to ensure that your efforts are consistent and reliable.
Above mentioned steps are used to develop social media customer service policy-
1. Find out more about your customers requirements: This can be done by conducting surveys , or talking to your service representatives about their experiences with complaints that are common or by asking your customer service team about their experience with typical complaints or inquiries.
2. Develop a visionary statement: Based on the research, you can create a precise vision statement that describes the ways to address these concerns.
3. Integrate research on customer requirements with your goals for customer service: Make sure your customer service objectives and your company values are in line with your clients’ requirements.
4. The company should train employees (especially those who are new) about the policy: To ensure everyone is on the same page, educate all staff in customer service on how to apply and follow this policy.
5. Be sure to review the policy regularly: Revisit the policy at least once a year, and at whenever you feel you’re in need of improving your customer service.
*The most important thing to remember : The creation of the social media customer service policy that ensures all staff members are on the same team.*
Final thoughts
In today’s modern digital world, the importance of social media is an amazing way to provide customer service. It proves to be a beneficial one for both company and customers because it’s an easy and systematic way to interact with each other.
Social media in customer service has become an essential part of bringing success and building brand loyalty. You need to develop a proper social media customer service policy as it is very important.
By having the right set of social listening tools, social media can uplift your digital community to a whole new level.
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