59% of people with social media accounts believe that social media has made customer service more accessible. Social media customer service is the perfect way to strengthen relationships with your customers by providing them with quick and personalised customer service. Here are our 8 top tips for social media customer service.
1.Respond Faster
Taking too long to respond can harm the relationships you have with your customers. Try dedicating one of your platforms to be more customer service based. A lot of companies use Twitter as a way being able to quickly respond and react to customer needs. Beauty Bay is an example of a company who does this well. They use Facebook and Instagram as their main marketing platforms and Twitter as customer support service as well as it functioning as a marketing platform.
2. Be proactive
The relationship you build with customers can always be built upon. Whether it’s sending them updates on regular offers through email, updating them on changes in policy or even just sending them the occasional discount. The White Company are perfect example of being proactive with their social media customer service. Regular shoppers with The White Company are occasionally sent discount cards off their next purchase in-store or online.
3. Personalise your social media customer service
Make your customer service human and personalised. Customers don’t tend to want generic responses and are looking for companies to create a relationship with them. Try to avoid sounding robotic and automated. When setting up an automated response with Facebook Messenger, set it so when a customer sends a message to your company’s page, Messenger will reply with the person’s first name at the start of the response.
4. Empathise with customers
Listen to what your customer is saying and how they are saying it. That way, you can provide all the relevant information they need and give it to them in an empathetic way. Tone of voice is a key way to fully empathise with customers. Whilst keeping in mind which platform you are communicating on, listening to the tone of voice on how the consumer is expressing their opinion, can give you the indication on how a customer service mater can be resolved.
5. Don’t always auto respond
90% of consumers now use social media to communicate with brands. As with giving personalised service, make sure you’re not automatically responding to customers every time they have an interaction with you. If you do this, then you can become disconnected from your customer base and harm your growth as a company.
6. Stick to the right channel
Are you where your customers are? Ensure that you are always on the right platform to communicate with your customers. If they are on LinkedIn, make sure you are using a more professional approach compared to if you are communicating with them on Facebook on Instagram. If you get your channels right, your social media customer service will free upvaluable time and resources.
7. Take things online
Sometimes it might be easier to get customers to email you or filling out a web form for customer service rather than filling a form in store or conducting a phone call. In doing this, they have a copy and you can respond more efficiently and empathically when conducting your social media customer service.
8. Maintain consistency
Probably the most important tip for anything that you do online – be consistent. Ensure that all your customers are getting the same high level of quality customer service across all platforms. Not only should the quality be maintained to a high standard. The accuracy of the information given to consumers should be a high level as well. It’s all well and good having amazing customer service, but if the information is not correct, the customer service will not be of an overall high quality.
Do you agree with our tips? Do you use any platforms for customer service? Tell us and join in the conversation on our Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram.
