Building customer relationships via different social media platforms and effectively managing said social media channels is vital to any brand’s success. Both social media and customer service can directly and greatly influence sales and, to some extent, brand connection and brand loyalty.
Although most social media platforms were specifically designed to help maintain personal interactions and were mostly for personal use, with their growing popularity and development, they’ve evolved into special tools that can help you build communities around your brand!
This article is here to show you how and why social media and customer service go hand-in-hand in the business world we live in today. You really can’t say you have a quality customer service system if social media hasn’t been integrated into the system. The mutual advantages of easy brand accessibility through YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and the like allow for engaging social interactions and easy customer contact. These platforms provide wide-scale connections and brand-building opportunities in several different ways.
Why Are Social Media Platforms Important For Your Customer Service?
When customers/clients come looking for you, you’ll need to prove to them that you can be helpful. And you’ll want to avoid leaving their questions unanswered at any cost. The response you give them in these situations usually determines whether they’ll pick you and if they’ll choose to come back to you in the future. But for that to happen, you have to be available to them in the first place. With social media becoming the preferred channel for most customer queries today, you can no longer afford to ignore joining your social media and customer service.
Since so many customers out there already use social media to communicate, businesses need to build and strengthen their social customer service efforts if they want to stay competitive. It’s also becoming easier to resolve customer service issues through social media. Furthermore, if you resolve customer concerns quickly and effectively over social media, these exchanges can help grow your customer base even more.
So let’s quickly examine how one can benefit from joining their social media and customer service systems.
Helps Build Authentic Customer Relationships
Many businesses out there use social media to merely self-promote and ignore the comments customers have made on their posts. Instead, you should use your Twitter and Facebook profiles to build authentic relationships with your consumers by engaging them in conversation.
When it comes to addressing customer queries, while failing to respond completely can negatively impact your brand, taking too long to answer can also be a problem. Convince & Convert recently found that about 42% of customers want to be responded to within 60-minutes on social media. The same research also shows that almost a third of them want to be responded to within 30-minutes. Therefore, timely responses can go a long way in making your customers happy on social media!
2. Helps In The Creation Of Customer Advocates
When a customer goes through a bad experience, the first thing they’re likely to do is to go online to write a negative review. Just think about how many horrible reviews you’ve come across in your lifetime while browsing through social media.
So instead of merely focusing on responding to negative comments, your brand strategy should center around providing great customer support to create a loyal customer base. That way, they’ll act as advocates for your brand if and when something negative is being said about it. Customer advocacy bases are usually an untapped demographic because a lot of businesses overlook the power these kinds of groups wield over a brand.
Creates A More Efficient Response Capability
When responding to customer complaints, listen closely to what the customer is actually saying. That’s because it’s important to let your customers know you value them and their feedback. If you’re not paying attention, you won’t respond well, which will in turn, displease the customer and negatively impact your brand. After all, when a business answers an individual on social media, it’s not just your followers who’ll see this response. Not replying at all can also be considered a poor response in many cases. With a free support software, you can keep track of all your social media mentions. This will enable the support teams to respond and resolve queries arising from social media at ease.
One tiny reply with an emoji or a simple ‘thank you’ can have a huge positive impact. It lets customers know that you care about their inputs, that you’re listening and are receptive. Another reason for doing this is to ensure your followers, including any potential customers/clients, know that your business is active on social and responds to its audience.
4. Provides Better Customer Engagement
Most brands don’t do so well with their social customer support because they’re simply not engaging with and listening to their customers. Businesses that are looking to provide effective customer support on social media might need to consider using social media monitoring tools to flag all messages and posts related to the products and services or the business itself.
Using chatbots to introduce automation can help you reduce the pressure on your human customer service agents. Striking the right balance between accessible customer support agents and automation will help you respond more effectively and efficiently to all the meaningful conversations.
Being inactive might mean a missed opportunity for both easy profits and positive customer interactions. Business Research claims that businesses that interact with their customers/clients on social media are often a lot more profitable than their counterparts that don’t. In addition to this, social media customer interactions have the potential of creating high returns on investment, especially if you’re using a 3rd party to manage your social media accounts or if you’ve got a department that solely deals with account moderation and content creation.
To Sum Things Up
Combining social media and customer service might just end up being one of the best things you do for your business. Social media is a great way to provide consumers with modern-day customer support. It is beneficial for both the company and the customers because it is incredibly easy to use for both. Hopefully, this article has shown you how important social media is to customer support. You can use these tips to improve your brand’s social media presence. And who knows, maybe the personality of your brand will someday be listed on BuzzFeed or Business Insider.