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4 Simple Steps to Improve your Social Media Customer Service

Category: Blog

These days, nearly every brand has a presence on social media, but is your customer support keeping up? We’ve compiled 4 simple steps to instantly improve your social media customer service…

 

Pick your social networks wisely

You don’t always need to be on every, single social network in order to provide top-notch customer service; you just need to be where your prospectiVe or current customers are! For example: a fashion brand with a young, social-savvy demographic in mind may choose to use Instagram to showcase their items- so, the customer service team should be responding to any customer compliments, complaints or queries within the comments section. On the flip-side, Instagram may not be as appropriate for a business services brand. The Marketing team will be able to

If you’re a smaller business, or just starting out, you may find Sprout Social’s Guide to Social Media Demographics handy…

 

Respond to EVERY interaction (yes, even the really bad ones…)

Relationship marketing is more important than ever, what with the ever-increasing number of social-savvy consumers. For this reason, you should be using any and all customer interactions as an excuse to show how great your customer service is- yes this means bad ones, too…move that mouse away from the delete option!

The goal here should be to turn the situation around for the customer, right where everyone can see.

It’s important to respond to all interactions/comments that head your way, be they in the form of complaints, queries, or positive feedback. And it’s not just your tagged interactions that you need to watch, either- make sure you’re searching your brand name regularly and responding to the people discussing your brand.

 

There’s a need for speed

Though social media is a written form of customer support, it’s important to understand that it’s not email… Both social and live chat are cited in numerous surveys as being the two main forms of support customers reach for when they’re in need of a speedy response. Customers aren’t looking for the same level of investigation, detail and formality that they look for with an email response; they want quick and accurate.

The key is to bring employees on to the team who can handle the speed required for social, whilst keeping up the right tone of voice for the brand and maintaining a high level of accuracy (phew!)- no pesky spelling/grammar mishaps or mistypes…

 

Know when to take things offline

As much as you should be looking to show off your high-level of customer service, it’s also important to know when to move the conversation away from prying eyes and towards direct/private messaging; whether this be to protect the customer, the brand, or both.

Remember: although you want to take sensitive conversations away from the public domain, it’s still always best to respect the customer’s chosen support platform and steer clear of trying to move your customer to another contact method- they’ve chosen social media and so social media is where they should receive their support. Simple!

 

 

If you need any help with your social media customer service, then get in touch to find out how we can improve your customers’ experience.