How to Provide Great Social Media Customer Care

Social media has developed from a means of marketing and advertising to a means of providing customer service. Social media customer care and 24/7 social media customer service are emerging as brands work with customers to resolve issues over social media. Let’s see how you can become a social media customer service pro.

Assess Where Your Customers Are

When it comes to providing customer service, you want to be on the social media platforms where your customers are interacting with your brand the most. Depending on your brand your biggest audiences may be on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, or any other social media site. Make sure that you are checking all social media platforms, because neglecting where people are talking about your brand may have negative consequences on both your brand name and sales.

Your Customer’s Input Matters

According to the Institute of Customer Service, 33% of people use social media to communicate with a brand or business. It is critical that your company uses the customer’s posts on social media to analyze problems and look at major concerns being raised. When analyzing the posts all together, you can determine major problems, identify the brand’s strength and weaknesses, and check whether your website addresses their questions.

Track and Manage Volume

When it comes to using social media to provide customer service, you want to track how many posts you are getting and whether you are receiving these posts directly, or if they are hard to find. If the volume of posts and questions are becoming too large, it may be smart to consider a customer service platform which can help manage and organize all conversations into one place. Check out Caperra if you want to consider customer service platforms.

Customers are used to instant gratification and tend to expect responses in hours or even minutes. It may be impossible to fulfill their request if their post is written overnight, or no one is on the social media platform at that moment. For these cases, leave a boilerplate message to guarantee their post has been received and will be addressed. If you tend to have large volume of questions always, consider implementing 24/7 social media customer service via live chat or phone support.

Care for your Social Media Customers

Customers want to know that you care about their issues and concerns. Assure that your responses are timely, precise, sensitive, concise and pleasant. You can use your own judgment to determine how formally or informally you may respond. Make sure you identify their problem, provide them with additional resources for help, and add your own personal touch.

Consider Taking the Issue Offline

What you write on social media is what customer build their perspective of you and your brand on. If there is a post that has a complicated problem, or that may require too many responses, consider moving the conversation to direct message, email, or other offline form of communication. If you have 24/7 social media customer service, consider using the live chat. When the problem is resolved, go back to the post on social media and thank your customer again.

Turn Negatives into Positives

We all know that social media posts may contain negative responses, complaints, and reviews. Use social media customer care to respond appropriately to these posts. Use these posts to build a relationship with your customer by acknowledging the problem, and going through the actions to fix the problem efficiently. Use their negative experience and turn it into a positive experience for both you and the customer.

Mind your Manners

Finally, we are going to close it with a list of things to never do when providing customer service through social media.

Do not neglect customers or hide their posts.
The customer is always right. Do not become defensive.
Do not overwhelm customers. Keep responses simple and short.
Do not engage if a customer is trying to undermine your brand.
If an issue seems to occur to many customers, do not respond to each directly with same answer. Write a public post addressing the issue and concern.