Your customers are your business’s most valuable asset and customer experience is now more important than ever. Thus, it makes sense that you’ll want to create the best customer experience possible. To a large extent, creating the best customer experience relies on providing stellar customer service.
Nowadays, to accomplish that, you’ll have to engage with your customers, answer their questions, and solve their problems on social media. But how do you do that?
Fortunately, we’re here to help. In this post, we’ll look at why social media is so important for customer service, how you can use it, and some of the tools that will help you.
Why Social Media is Important for Customer Service?
More than 50% of the world’s population now uses social media in its various forms. It’s thus easy to see why social media is one of the most popular platforms where customers will research a brand or product, shop, and, more importantly, raise their concerns or voice their opinions.
As a result, it makes sense that businesses use social media to increase their customer service levels and enhance the customer experience. If they do, customers will be able to reach them, and they’ll be able to answer questions and solve customers’ problems, which leads to more loyalty and stronger customer relationships.
How to Use Social Media for Customer Service
We’ve now recapped why social media is important for customer service, so let’s look at how you can use social media for customer service.
Be Available
When you want to use social media for customer service, it’s crucial that you be available. Simply put, if you aren’t available, customers won’t be able to reach you and any other strategies you use won’t be as effective, if at all. If this happens, you won’t be able to interact with customers and solve their problems, with the result that the customer experience will suffer.
Be Responsive
Being available is one thing. However, that’s only one piece of the puzzle. For your social media efforts to be most effective, you should also be responsive. In other words, if a customer has a complaint, it’s vital that you respond, no matter how challenging it is. When you do, you’ll acknowledge that your customers matter and that you take their concerns to heart.
But being responsive goes further than just responding. When doing so, you should also pay attention to what the customer has to say and let customers understand that you’re listening. This can have a positive impact on your customer experience.
Monitor Brand Mentions
With social media, it’s important to understand that not all complaints will be made directly to you. Customers might complain to their friends, in groups, in videos, and more. For this reason, you should monitor social media for any mentions of your brand or product.
In this way, you’ll be able to identify any issues quickly and be able to sort them out before they become public relations disasters.
Consider Establishing a Dedicated Support Channel
An effective strategy to ensure your availability is to establish a dedicated support channel for your business on social media. This could be anything from a dedicated social media account to a business page or even a group where customers can voice their concerns.
When you use this strategy, it’s also essential to have someone monitor the channel consistently to ensure that no issues or complaints fall between the cracks.
Take Customer Service Issues Private
It will often happen that customers post negative comments on your social media pages after a bad experience. For an effective social media customer service strategy, it’s crucial that you answer or acknowledge both positive and negative feedback on your social media pages.
However, when dealing with any negative feedback given or complaints made in public, it’s best that you engage with the customer in private. If you don’t, you could become involved in an argument with a customer in public, which reflects negatively on your company.
Build Relationships
Ultimately, the goal of your social media customer service efforts should be to build lasting relationships with your customers. These relationships will allow you to foster loyalty and trust, which will not only help you retain existing customers but also attract new ones.
This means that most of the things you do on social media should be aimed at building and fostering relationships with your customers.
Social Media Tools to Support Customer Service
Considering the above, it’s easy to see why social media is important for your customer experience and how you can go about implementing social media in your customer service processes. Here are some of the tools you can use to improve your customer service through social media.
Messaging Apps
Messaging apps are invaluable when you want to communicate with your customers on social media. They allow you to communicate with customers directly and sort out any issues in private. Here, some examples include Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp.
Live Chat
Live chat is an excellent option if you have the manpower available for it. If you do, your customers will be able to chat with an agent directly and have their problems sorted much faster compared to email or, in many cases, customer service by phone. Examples of live chat tools include Help Scout and Podium.
Chatbots
If they don’t have the workforce to support live chat, chatbots might be the perfect option for you. These chatbots are able to provide relevant and helpful information which, in many cases, allows customers to solve their problems. If not, they’re able to transfer customers to agents who can assist them further.
Another benefit of chatbots is that they’re able to provide customer service at all times of the day, irrespective of what your business’s business hours are. Examples of chatbot platforms include Intercom and WotNot.
Analytics Tools
No matter what tool you use to provide customer service through social media, it’s crucial that you use an analytics tool that can give you valuable insights into your customer service processes.
With these insights, you’ll be able to identify any inefficiencies and be able to implement the necessary strategies to improve and serve your customers better. Examples of customer service analytics tools include Zendesk and Mixpanel.
Leverage Social Media to Improve Your Customer Service Today
When you want to provide your customers with stellar customer experiences, it’s crucial that you provide excellent customer support. This, in turn, requires that you meet your customers where they are. Nowadays, that means that you’ll need to engage with your customers, solve their problems and issues, and answers their questions on social media.
Hopefully, this post helped illustrate how you can do this and what tools you can use to make the process simpler. To improve your customer experience even further, you also need a robust and reliable phone system. This is where ULTATEL comes in. Our cloud-based phone system has all the features you need to revolutionize the way you and your customers communicate.
To learn more about ULTATEL and how we can help you, request a demo today.
