Customer service can make or break a business, now more than ever. Customer service professionals who listen carefully to customer complaints can work with their organization to fix issues so that consumers continue to use their services and recommend them to others. Sales are increased as a result, and the sales team can more easily determine that they are promoting high-quality goods. A drop in consumers often comes from poor customer service, which lowers sales and earnings for your company. This can start a vicious cycle where a business tries to save costs on hiring people or providing customer service training, which causes service levels to fall even lower.
These facts have always been true. The way companies provide customer service, however, has changed. In a recent JD Power poll of more than 23,000 internet shoppers, 67% of participants said they had asked a business for assistance on social media.
What Does Social Media Customer Service Look Like
Within the whole customer service ecosystem, it is a crucial and quickly expanding contact channel that supports call-based customer care. It includes assistance before, during, and after the sale. It also entails tasks like handling grievances, offering advice, responding to inquiries, or giving refunds.
Social media customer care provides assistance through social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. It enables companies to immediately respond to inquiries from clients and meet them where they are. More than 60% of customers believe that resolving a problem quickly is the most crucial aspect of good service.
Why Use Facebook as Your Main Platform for Social Media Customer Service
The market is filled with numerous social media platforms. Not every channel will give your business the same results. It is crucial to know which social media network has the most following. Pick the locations where clients are more likely to engage with your brand. Alternately, you might conduct a study and ask your clients which social networking sites they frequent the most. Once you have the answers, you may aid your customer's preferred network with customer care.
At 7Social, we find Facebook to be the best platform for most companies. Users of Facebook come from every demographic. You can find them on Facebook, regardless of whether you're seeking to attract teenagers or retirees. Facebook is used by 72% of American people online. 82% of internet adults in the 18 to 29 age range, 79% in the 30 to 49 age range, and 64% in the 50 to 64 age range utilize it. Nearly 50% of internet users 65 and older use Facebook.
Additionally, they use it several times each day. Almost all your customers will have the Facebook app directly on their phone, or the website bookmarked to their computer. This means access is quick and easy.
Best Practices for Customer Service on Facebook
So, in the era of social media, what are the finest methods for customer service that will make your consumers feel heard and noticed, hence increasing your sales? That is what we are here to help you find out today.
Keep an Eye on Social Media Mentions
Social media monitoring is crucial to successful customer service, no matter the platform. Monitoring your brand's mentions on social media includes keeping a watch on them and responding to any discussion that arises. It is an immediate response technique that applies to all forms of brand discussion, including product reviews, product inquiries, and even service repair complaints. The fact that social media monitoring is not limited to direct mentions or comments on your postings is more significant. It also includes postings that make reference to your brand without tagging you. It's crucial to set up your social monitoring tools because these posts won't show up in your typical network notifications.
Making your clients feel heard and supported is the instant benefit of social media monitoring. After all, people mention your brand for a number of reasons. 47% of customers send inquiries about products or services on social media by mentioning the brand.7% of customers send inquiries about products or services on social media.
It also helps you to get to know your audience better. You can learn what your audience is saying, thinking, and wanting by keeping an eye on your brand. Despite the fact that you may believe you know your customers based on assumptions and market research, you still need to directly ask them for their opinions and views. You can learn more about your consumers' characteristics and preferences in this way. Remember, the more relevant data you have, the better you can adapt to increase sales!
Set Up a Facebook Business Page
Prior to even considering providing customer support on Facebook, you must first build a presence. The Ad Center, Creator Studio, Insights, and other features that come with Pages may be used by businesses to better advertise their brands on social media. You can create a community, assess your success, and control platform advertising with a Facebook Page. The tools that come with a Facebook Business Page are invaluable as you seek to establish A-grade customer service, true but there is so much more to it than that.
Filling out the Page Info area will go a long way toward making your company appear approachable to everyone who stumbles across your Page. Go to your Facebook page, choose "Edit Page Info" in the top menu, and provide as much information as you can there, including a description of your company, your opening and closing times, your address and phone number, your website url, and your pricing range. Customers will be looking for these things every day, and if the information is difficult to obtain, your firm may be skipped over entirely. Making info about your business hard to access is a red flag pointing to horrible customer service!
As part of our Page Creation, Setup & Management, 7Social can do all the hard work of creating your Page for you! If you already have a Facebook Page, we will perform an audit and make the necessary changes to make it perform better.
Create Guidelines for How Your Reps Behave on Facebook
Compared to social media marketing, social media customer support has different potential and obstacles. But having social media policies in place is just as crucial. These ought to be in line with the social marketing team's values and those of your business. Remember that these guidelines will help keep things consistent for all customers and can help avoid negative experiences.
The guidelines for your brand's online customer care should cover the following topics.
Make sure that one of your guidelines is transparency! Social media complaints from customers may or may not have simple solutions. Even though you are not required to answer a client's question immediately, you should be forthright about how long it will take to fix their issue. Your consumers will appreciate honesty more than having to ask you, for the millionth time, when you'll address their issue, whether you need to submit a ticket with your product team or you honestly don't know how long it will take to repair an outage.
Be Strategic in Your Post Responses
Companies will receive a lot of critical remarks on social media in addition to favorable ones. Both categories of reviews need a response from the brand.
The social media support staff must refrain from rewarding the haters of your company and its goods with snarky replies.Anger meeting anger almost never works to resolve the consumer's issues. However, they must also be careful not to over involve themselves with positive conversations. Replies should be short, sweet and to the point while still reflecting empathy.
You may read the consumer's brand perception by identifying the most popular comments and postings. As a result, you may adjust how services and product development are deployed properly. In a perfect world, the customer care crew will engage the consumers in discussion without deviating into off-topic remarks.
Make Use of Messenger
A new paradigm in customer help communication and management is being fueled by direct messaging (and its mobile-first nature). Additionally, statistics show that customers are happy when the customer experience is included in the tools they currently use. For this reason, direct messaging applications like Facebook Messenger mark a significant shift in how customers and businesses interact.
With messenger, you can receive alerts when your company receives a text message on your mobile device and send an automated message every time a new message arrives. You may customize your message to say welcome, offer further information about your Page, or specify when you expect a response. Please note that to change your Page’s messaging status to away automatically outside of business hours, you must first compose an away message.
Messenger allows you to set up and confirm appointments, orders, and payments with customers, but----- it can do so much more. Facebook has actually been releasing new chat plugins for a while now, enabling users to start a conversation with a business via Facebook after installing the plugin on their website.
With the help of this update, customers can now contact businesses through Facebook even when they are not using the social media platform, and they can also pick up where they left off at any moment using the Messenger app on their smartphone. This is critical because one of the biggest pet peeves for most consumers is to be left waiting forever for a response from customer service!
As part of our Page Creation, Setup & Management, we can assist in your website's chatbot creation and deployment using messenger. That means you leave all the technical stuff to 7Social so you can focus on top-notch service!
Make Use of Data to Improve Customer Service Interactions
We’ve said it before, and we'll say it again here. Data is king! Not only when it comes to marketing but also when it comes to customer service.
A company can be losing clients without realizing it if it doesn't look at data about their interactions with it. Reviewing such data might reveal bad practices, frequent incidents that turn clients away, and communication gaps. It’s crucial to maintain track of the quantity, nature, and, if available, sentiment analysis of your conversations with customers, both positive and negative. Tracking regularly recurring comments and feedback, both good and negative, in a document can help you keep the outcomes of qualitative feedback close to hand.
Learning more about customers is the immediate advantage of recording all customer interactions. You can monitor how your audience uses your website, goods, social media platforms, in-app, across devices, etc. You may have a better insight into the demographics, preferences, preferred channels, and other aspects of the audience with thorough behavioral data. You may create precise, thorough customer profiles before creating a more pertinent marketing message and targeting plan.
Tracking improves user experience, but it also helps you improve your customer service overall! Once you comprehend how audiences connect with your business on Facebook, you will be able to spot user experience concerns that you would have missed otherwise. Regarding customer service, it is normal practice to pass on concerns to many customer care personnel. With a thorough database of client complaints, however, staff are better equipped to resolve issues. Improving customer service has the additional benefit of reducing negative reviews and exposure about your company. Resolving issues before dissatisfied customers vent on Facebook is advantageous for all parties involved.
Final Thoughts
In addition to utilizing the competitive advantage afforded by Facebook-centered customer services, savvy businesses regularly analyze and implement new social media trends. For instance, advancements in such technologies as AI and chatbots will radically transform how companies manage support queries, and we can help you set yours up!
Regardless of whether you're utilizing a chatbot or a human to provide customer assistance, you must always reply. Treat social media clients the same as you would customers who phone a firm or go into a physical location.
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