10 Customer Service Tips for Businesses Leveraging Social Media

Customer service has rapidly progressed on social media. Gone are those days when your customers would write a letter or pick up the phone and wait in queue for the customer service executive to solve their problems. Now your audiences take to social platforms immediately to voice their displeasure and expect an instant reply. You haven’t encountered anything like this? You might need to check if your audience know you exist.

It is important that you start strategizing on how to make your social platforms the new frontier for customer service. The tips mentioned below will help you become the ultimate hotline for customer service.

1. Encourage and Respond to Feedbacks

Social media provides the ultimate opportunity to connect with customers through customer service. Providing customer service can be an entry point to an ongoing relationship, it is a great opportunity for conversation and connection with the brand. It shows the customers that you care about them and can be a great beginning to a long lasting relationship if it’s done right.

Example – The official Xbox support Twitter handle encourages their followers for their feedback and responds to all their queries in real-time. This is a great example of customer service done right!

2. Don’t respond like a Bot

Today customers expect you to solve problems and answer questions quickly, efficiently and publicly, through whatever channel they choose. They want a quick solution, so it is essential that when responding to customer complaints/queries do not have the automated response for all of them, take some time out and draft personal messages and personalize the experience for them.

Example – Dominos India on their Twitter handle, has received a couple of complaints from their customers citing them being unhappy with delivery or product. Instead of reassuring their customers, they are sending out the same reply to almost everyone like a bot.

3. Great Research Insights

When your customers are taking their time out of their daily lives by posing – queries, complaints or even feedback sometimes. These insights are the perfect research tool for you, as you don’t have to look for the answers for your brand they are right there in front you. Make productive changes in your end product/service ultimately your goal is to make your customers happy and emerge victorious. Here is some more advice on mistakes you should avoid on Social Media.

4. Share User Stories

To increase the credibility in front of your customers, make use of customer testimonials in forms of them quoting of how you helped solve their problem or a video. Thus it increases the faith of other users, and in a way instils trust in them that if they are having a problem with your product/service you will help them out and that your support doesn’t end after selling to them.

5. Train your Personnel

Now that you understand the importance of listening to your customers, the next step is to assign someone to actually do it. Don’t make the mistake like most brands that they give their interns the responsibility to handle their brand pages. Make sure you hire someone with the right skills and train them, to respond to customer queries/complaint. Make sure your social media person is in sync with the one who knows technical details about your product/services as well. Don’t miss to check these tips on handling complaints on Social Media.

6. Make use of Add-on Applications

It is very difficult to keep track of all social platforms and various actives happening on all of them. Thus it is always helpful to have external help in the form of 3rd party applications which makes the job easier for you to make sure you don’t miss out on a single thread of information. There are various social media tools you can use, it will enable you to organize all your requests and process them with just one click. These applications will be your additional eyes and ears!

7. Transform their Negative experience into a Positive Experience

You may belong to any industry, but you’re expected to provide a positive experience to your audiences. Negative experiences are the ones that stick best to their minds and are hard to erase. It will difficult to please all your consumers, but you need to make up by being extra polite and adhering to all their needs.

It is very important to be polite and considerate you can add in a little bit of humor but only if you think you can pull it off. You don’t have the power to please all your customers only through your products, but you can hell as make them love you with your interaction and customer service.

Example – I think it is fair to say, we all at some point in time have complained about Vodafone’s network issues. But they provide exceptional customer service which makes up for their bad product sometimes.

8. Keep it Mobile Friendly

These days, most of your users are browsing social networks through some portable device such as a smartphone or tablet. Thus keep this in mind while sharing content/links to their queries that your site/page is Mobile optimized. So they can easily connect with you when they want too without any difficulty.

9. Reply Promptly

The more engaged you are, the less likely you are to have an online crisis. Thus it is very important to be spontaneous, and solve the problem/query for your customer so it doesn’t leave distaste in their minds about your brand. And very importantly social media is not a 9-5 job, Monday- Friday you need to be attentive and reply as soon as they post their concern you cannot wait until Monday morning to reply, it can be a catastrophic event for your brand sometimes if not handled well; so always be on the radar and be spontaneous.

Example – KLM is the perfect example when it comes to replying promptly they answer all your queries be it the smallest one, there was a particular person who asked a question in French and they answered their query in their dialect to personalize and at the same time make them comfortable.

10. Learn To Apologize

This is truly a golden rule, for customer service on social media. So repeat to self, “Customer is never wrong, even when they are wrong”. Always try to deliver value to your customers, when you did a mistake, simply accept it. They know there are humans behind the brand and you can make mistakes too. In some cases customers may be wrong as well; bring it to their notice in a right manner. Don’t do blunders like Times of India.

Customer Service is only about listening, and your customers talking. Do not take it for granted as it can make a lot of difference for your brand, with positive remarks it would spread awareness about your brand. But with one unsatisfied customer if not taken proper care, it could cost you your entire marketing efforts. Hence to maintain a healthy relationship with your customers, acknowledge their problems and revert swiftly.