How to: Use Social Media for Customer Service
Your customers will often take to social media to complain about your brand. Publicly.
I am sure you have seen some examples of posts where individuals complain about well-known brands. You may have even have done it yourself.
So what do you do if someone complains about you?
If you are a large brand/company you may have a dedicated customer service social media account (and a professional to manage it). However, but for the rest of us, we may need to look at doing something ourselves. It is also likely that we will need to have a strategy in place to deal with complaints and negative comments. Customers expect a response and a resolution to their problem.
Following social media customer service best practices is a vital part of your social media strategy. It will help you support and retain your customers. It will also help you manage your reputation.
Social Media and Customer Service
So why use social media at all for customer service? Well using social media as part of your customer service toolkit can mean that you raise the standard of your customer service levels. Social media is used to engage in two-way conversations and can be used as part of your brand awareness strategy and will help you engage with and “Listen” to customers.
Creating a brand with an inclusive and helpful community via social media is the goal of any business. Good customer service should be part of this. If you are a large brand or a digital/online brand you may even wish to create a dedicated customer service/support account. If you decide to create a social channel strictly for customer support, be sure to include the handle/details in your brand’s other social profile bios so people know where to reach out for support-related requests.
There are some easy rules that you can follow to ensure that your customers have a good brand experience:
1. Reply as quickly as possible on social media.
Most forms of customer support via phone and email are not typically expected to be available 24/7. Yet, social media customer support has created an “always-on” expectation. As a result, 42% of consumers expect a response on social media within 60 minutes.
Customers who have a bad customer service experience (in this case not getting a response) they will go on to complain to friends and family on social media and may complain even more publicly. They are also less likely to use your services / buy your product again. If the comments are negative and need to be contained, take offline but show that you are engaging and solving issues where you can.
If you are not “always-on” and your probably don’t want to be manage expectations by specifying your hours of availability / when your account is monitored. On Facebook you might want to consider the use of messenger bots to help you out if you do not have the ability or resources to monitor your social media accounts full-time.
2. Create Customer Service Guidelines.
For example: Should you publicly or privately respond? This depends on the nature of the issue. Have a look at how the big brands are responding to complaints. It is usually a mixture of public and private. Public so that the public can see that they are being pro-active and responding to the issue, privately so that it doesn’t get out of control or it is too complex to deal with concisely.
Let’s take Twitter as an example – twitter is all about relationships and two way conversations. The challenge is Twitter’s 280-character limit. If this is not enough to deal with the issue it is best to take the conversation off line and deal with it by DM or email. If you are using twitter you may wish to use the link feature that Twitter provides to make it easy to change to DMs.
Create a process to provide clear direction on handling customer service through social media for your business and create some guidelines for your business.
For Example:
- consider who will review incoming customer comments and determine the necessary interaction?
- decide which kinds of comments should be resolved publicly. E.g. on page posts or reviews for Facebook, or openly via tweets on Twitter.
- determine which conversations should become private and whether it be moved to direct message, email or phone.
- include some examples of positive and negative comments, based on customer service interactions you have already had (or expect you might come across) and how you would deal with them.
- include answers to frequently asked questions
- create a series of pre-written replies to help streamline the process of social network moderation (but use only as guidelines and modify to reflect the situation).
- create a protocol on escalation or other customer issues
These guidelines will vary from business to business. However, the guidelines are important to document and follow, as consistency and good customer service can only strengthen your overall brand.
3. Respond to all social media feedback, questions, and comments.
Every post, review, and check-in on social media needs some form of acknowledgment. We are not just talking about complaints here. But everything. You do not want to create a negative experience for your customers by ignoring them. If you are a small business it is worth dedicating time engaging with your social media activity as a way to build your online community. If you are a larger company and social media only forms a small part of your customer service strategy you may choose to simply acknowledge positive comments with a simple “like”, while putting more time into dealing with negative comments. The choice is yours and what you will and won’t respond to should form part of your guidelines.
Monitor your social media accounts to ensure that these are picked up.
4. Give your replies a personal touch. Be authentic. Be transparent.
If a name is apparent from your customer’s social profile, don’t hesitate to use it with a greeting. Signing off your customer service response with a name or initials also helps to humanise/personalise the interaction.
5. Monitor customer service through social media
To make the job easier you should be monitoring customer service activity on Facebook and Twitter or other platforms of choice with tools such as:
As well as monitoring replies and mentions you should also include searches for phases such as your brand name so that you can respond to questions or issues. This removes the need for your company/brand being directly @ mention or being tagged.