Why Social Media is the update Customer Service needs
These days if we want to ask a business a question, rather than picking up the phone we’ll go to our social media profiles and tweet or post on Facebook. The days of using a phone to contact Customer Services are dwindling, and social media is coming out on top as one of the most common ways to get in touch with a business.
But how does social media match up to the more personal communication method of actually speaking to someone on the phone? Alongside being faster, it makes Customer Service simpler and more direct. And why wouldn’t it be? With so many consumers utilising Twitter, Facebook, LinkedInand so on to connect, it was kind of inevitable.
One of the best (and debatably worst) parts about social media is the ability to automate. Whether that’s general tweets or actual replies, being tempted to create a library of canned responses which can be used whenever you want does sound like an attractive solution.Using these as holding messages is okay in certain situations – especially if you need more time to research a problem or need to pass the query on to a different department. But nothing really beats a personalised Tweet or Facebook message, written especially for that specific person.
When a business goes the extra mile and shows their personality in their replies (including details such as your name and actual details of your query), it shows some thought and effort has gone into it, making you feel less like you’re engaging with a blank screen.
Not only can you show your businesses personality through using social media as a Customer Service method, you can massively improve the customer experience by offering them a quick, painless way to talk to you. You can respond to a number of tweets in quick succession, meaning that customers don’t feel neglected or forgotten about.
But how fast can you physically respond to customers on social media? Setting your standards too high might cause upset if you become overwhelmed or have a lack of staff on a particular day.But if you set it too low, operators might become distracted and unproductive. Finding the middle ground is one of the most important things to establish when setting up Customer Service on social media.
If customers are interacting on Twitter, they only have so many characters to play with, meaning they have to keep their query straight to the point until you move them into direct messaging.This means problems will hopefully be rectifiedfaster and more easily, meaning Customer Service operators have more time to deal with more queries rather then spending too much time on fewer(read:one at a time).
Then there are the insights you can mine from social media. With one ear to the ground, you can monitor what people (whether they are customers or not) are saying about the brand with little to no effort. Social media allows companies to interact with direct and indirect tweets, to hopefully change a bad opinion into a good one or make a good view even better!
Our last bit of advice? Preparation. Don’t run head first into using social media as a Customer Service format, you can cause more harm then it is worth with a badly worded tweet or inappropriately timed canned response.
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