An Efficient and Effective Tool For Customer Service: Social media, which was once used just to connect people, has now emerged as an essential and powerful marketing tool.

While popular social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. not only provide opportunities to post updates and follow influencers, friends and family members but they also allow customers to follow and interact with brands and products of their choice.

Customer service via social media is all the rage now —you can provide personalised, instantaneous support to customers on the channel of their choice. Social media sites have evolved into vibrant platforms that help brands in their marketing and advertising strategies. They provide the perfect avenue for brands to get in touch with customers and strengthen customer relationships.

Customers find it easy and convenient to engage and interact with brands through social media channels. This is why it is the perfect platform to share thoughts, opinions, concerns, or issues about particular products or services. As people spend most of their time online, they tend to express their feelings more on digital platforms. In effect, both positive and negative experiences with a product or service are shared on social media by mentioning particular brands in their post or by writing brand reviews.

Such public reviews or opinions offer opportunities for brands to transform a negative experience into a positive one, by acknowledging and addressing the issue in a timely fashion. Receiving negative feedback will rectify the brand’s image and strengthen customer relationships. CX improves with timely customer service, as customers feel heard and valued. Real-time feedback from customers about their products and services will help brands increase their overall revenue.

Transparent Problem Resolution

Social media offers a simple, fast and transparent channel for communication. All online customers will be able to view the brand’s customer service activity through social media. In this way, social media platforms help organizations showcase their customer support services.

Moreover, conventional customer support solutions through telephone or email offer only one-to-one communication — it only stays between two people whereas communication through social media is one-to-many. Social media broadcasts information widely. This cuts down repetitive queries. Correspondingly, excellent customer service through social media will help companies to spread the word about their brand.

More Information About The Customer

Social media pages contain a lot of information about customers including their interests, and contacts. Interaction through social media will allow agents to build a sort of personal connection with the customer. Such interactions will allow agents to provide unique personalized service to each customer.

Word of Mouth Referrals

Social media platforms let brands respond to customer queries quickly and promptly. Remember, customers are the real assets of any business. And so, improving customer experience through social media customer service will retain existing customers. Effective Tool For Customer Service.

Also, studies suggest that people trust their friends and contacts more than they trust advertisements. Improving CX will help in converting your customers into highly vocal brand advocates. Satisfied customers who have experienced excellent customer support will bring in new customers through positive word of mouth referrals.

Less Expensive

The most cost-effective method to respond to customer queries is through social media. It brings down the cost per interaction to around $1. Almost 67% of customers use social media to interact with brands. Undoubtedly, with proper maintenance of a social media page, brands can directly engage with their customers at a low cost.

Social Listening Helps In Obtaining Keywords

By listening to online customer conversations, brands can obtain a set of keywords that are relevant to their business. These keywords will help plan digital marketing strategies to bring more traffic to their website. Similarly, monitoring queries and concerns of customers related to business will help brands in deriving insights about problems that were uncovered before. Proactive listening is one of the most powerful aspects of social media.

Access To Target Audiences

Social media platforms provide brands with direct access to their target audiences. It enables companies to directly observe what their customer wants, what changes are to be made, and what could be done to improve their performance. This way, when brands provide prompt responses through social media, customers will remain brand loyal and will bring in new customers through word-of-mouth referrals. Effective Tool For Customer Service.

Create a strategy

Before incorporating social media channels into your existing customer support solutions, it is important to create a social customer service strategy. Initially, set up a brand monitoring tool within the social media platform to identify posts and comments with specific words. This will help you figure out the most relevant content or the most common queries asked by the customer. 

Remember to respond to both positive and negative comments. Do not get dragged into conversations that are not related to your business. At the same time, maintain reasonable engagement with your customers. Create a priority list and give more attention to urgent, critical issues. 

Maintain a dedicated customer support channel within social media platforms. Direct customers who need assistance to your social media support page. A separate support profile will act as a reference platform where customers can go through previous queries and replies which will help in solving minor issues themselves. 

Select a few key performance indicators to gauge the performance of your customer service strategies. Indicators like First Contact Resolution, resolution time, complaint escalation rate, etc will help in analysing your performance. Similarly, qualitative feedback and customer satisfaction surveys will help in measuring the performance of your customer service. Such an effort will help in improving your customer service strategies by concentrating on specific areas that require greater attention.

Social media customer service will improve operational efficiency and promote business growth. Social media data allows brands to derive valuable insights into customer relationships and behaviour. Analysis of such data will help you to distinguish clearly between the customer needs and wants. Dynamic, real-time customer support solutions through social media will help brands to stay ahead of their competitors. Utilise social media, be transparent and provide positive, quick responses to produce a higher turnover.