How to provide brilliant customer service via social media?

5 min read

Providing brilliant customer service is not easy, especially in our always connected world. Social media platforms are one of the most effective methods of communication with your customers. What do you need to make your customer service department your competitive advantage?

Studies have shown that 42% of consumers uses social media to express their problems and they expect resolution within 60 minutes maximum. 32% of consumers expect an immediate response within 30 minutes.

Having these statistics in mind, it’s absolutely crucial to provide an outstanding customer service. There are some ways to provide a better social customer service. Let’s get to it.

Here are our tips for brilliant customer service via social media!

Use social listening

To help your customers solve their problems, you have to be aware of any issues they might have. To spot any queries on time, you should take a look at social listening solution.

A media monitoring tool, for example, Brand24 tracks mentions in real time in all major social media platforms, including, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Twitch, and TikTok.

Moreover, the tool covers blogs, websites, discussion forums, podcasts, and publicly available newsletters.

How can you use the data collected by a social listening tool in your customer service?

For starters, look at all the mentions about your brand, product, or service.

In the dashboard, you can easily spot negative mentions. Reacting to the them in time will help you maintain positive reputation and prevent any crisis from escalating.

Many customers will ask questions on their social media channels. What’s more, they will expect your answer within minutes.

Brand24 will collect all mentions containing your predefined keywords and analyse the results.

What’s more, the tool will tell you when any new mention appears in the dashboard. Real-time monitoring will make sure that you will always be able to react in time.

Brand24 offers three types of notifications:

  • in-app notifications (both for iOS and Android)
  • Slack integration — you can receive all new mentions to a dedicated Slack channel
  • storm alerts and email reports — every day when new mentions appear or their is a sudden surge in online mentions, you will receive an email notification.

That’s the first step towards right customer service — always be aware!

Improve your customer service! Try Brand24 for free (no credit card required!)

Don’t miss other articles on social listening in customer service, research and social selling.

Track customer happiness

To provide brilliant customer service, you not only need to monitor what is being said about your brand, product, or service.

You also need to analyse the results of your media monitoring project. When it comes to customer success, you should take a closer look at the sentiment around your brand.

Sentiment tells you how people feel about certain topics. Brand monitoring tools usually categorise sentiment as positive, negative, or neutral.

If you see prevailing positive sentiment, it means you are doing a good job. If you spot a rising number of negative posts, you should take a closer look at it. It can be an indicator of a crisis in the making.

Customer Happiness

Create separate social media accounts

Creating a separate customer service account keeps support inquiries away from the main social media profile of a company. Customer support team can focus directly on providing help and marketers can focus on managing the brand on social media.

Moreover, most customers will go directly to the right account, saving you a lot of time and effort.

The easier it is to find your customer service, the less irritated your clients will be.

Separate Social Media Accounts

Show the human face

People generally prefer dealing with humans rather than brands, so the key to delivering great customer service in social media lays in providing speedy, personal and empathetic responses.

You can also use signatures for different representatives in order to sign their tweets and show the human side of your brand.

Show the Human Face

Establish a tone of voice

The more your company grows, the more employees will be involved in customer care. To provide the best customer service, develop a uniform tone of voice in well in advance.

A tone of voice will make sure that all your employees use uniformed language across all communication channels. Customer service representatives will know when to use a pun, how to respond to customers complaints. Tone of voice is like a logo — it makes sure that no matter where your clients find you, they will know they are dealing with the same brand.

Respond quickly

According to a study conducted by NM Incite Survey, 33% of the respondents would recommend brands offering quick and ineffective responses. Only 17% would recommend brands offering a slow but an effective solution. In fact, 19% of responders recommend  brands providing no answer.

Respond Quickly

Help them where they are

If a customer seeks help on Twitter, then he or she expects the answer in a form of a tweet and not an email. Getting shuffled around is a customer service pet peeve both offline and offline as a study conducted by American Express says. It helps to know and understand where the customers are looking for help. Twitter is the place where you are most likely to hear from your customers.

Help Them Where They Are

Go above and beyond

Going beyond expectations can give you more brand advocates providing some fantastic PR. A brand with a great strategy is able to deliver better customer service on a level that is generally unexpected by your customers.

In the example below, Peter Shankman jokingly asked his favorite restaurant to deliver him a steak after he lands at the Newark airport. To his surprise, when his plane landed, he was greeted by a Morton’s delivery guy with a porterhouse steak.

Go Above and Beyond

Do you need a brilliant customer service on social media?

Customer service in social media offers customers with some unparalleled support, interaction and engagement. Also, it’s cost-effective and makes your customers more satisfied. Do you remember the frustration during customer service calls? Then you know what to avoid and the best tool for it are social media.

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