Want to improve your social media customer service, try these

Just remember this is customer service week. Trust you have been having a swell time taking your customers along with you on your newly-found strategies. And in case you have not oiled your approach, it is just mid-week – pardon me the day is almost gone.

By the way, would you rather sticks to old ways or you want to try some new set of tricks? Never mind if you don’t know how to go about this.  I got this tips from Social Media Today to share with you.

I promised I would not be caught cutting and pasting on this blog. But it is quick tricky fulfilling some promises. Pardon me to break the promise I made. After all, it is all for your good as I could not have done a better interesting easy-to-ready piece like this guys have done. Check the tips here (again, they are not my ideas but that of socialdiaytoday.com):

Brand showcasing

Unlike a phone call, social media customer service leaves a clear digital trail, available to current and future customers the moment they run a Google search. With this is mind, it becomes clear that although the contact centre team is often the best choice to manage this role, they need to be well versed in your brand’s vision and marketing goals. When you’re deciding to work with an outsourced contact centre partner, choose a provider that cares about assimilating their team of agents into your brand and culture.

Any social media interaction adds to a company’s brand image, and these agents need to match the right voice and tone. The challenge of social media is that consumers are often protected by the anonymity of the internet, meaning they are often harsher online than they might be in other situations. Official responses to their complaints and comments need to be solution-oriented, without getting defensive. Building brand loyalty and customer retention through social media requires a delicate balance of personable authenticity and process-focused resolution.

Best practices

If your brand is inundated with consumer tweets (recall situations, for example, can spike your volume in mere seconds) or you simply don’t have enough resources to tackle them as responsively as you’d like, Twitter suggests a “triage” strategy. Analyse and prioritise social engagement with a number of considerations in mind: Most importantly, is a comment a direct mention or message to your brand or is it a broad passing comment?

It’s best to tackle the direct ones first. Secondly, establish the parameters for prioritisation – will your agents be required to assess the influence of the user? We know social media thrives on ‘shareability’, and if a user who engages with you has a large, active following, their mentions, direct or indirect, you may want to consider what protocols you will put in place for interacting with high ranking influencers – consider the risks and rewards of those interactions. A public conversation with major influencer can mean your audience reaches a wide audience with one post. That can work to your advantage in high volume situations like a service disruption.

 Additionally, make sure agents are well trained in when and how to adeptly and tactfully move conversations from the public realm to private direct messaging. Risk mitigation is key – basically, your agents need to be able to assess sentiment, determine how broad the audience is, and how best to collaborate with the consumer to find a resolution before they can begin the process of resolving the issue.

If an issued is moved from public to private, it can be extremely valuable to close the loop in public so the audience to the conversation understand a resolution has been reached. For example, on Twitter, posting a closing tweet like “Thanks for connecting through DM. Glad we were able to make things right for you!” lets anyone following the original conversation knows that you didn’t just drop the ball or ignore the problem.

Another strategy to consider is creating content to answer common questions more effectively. This is where a strong bridge between the contact centre team and the marketing team is key. Linking to a blog post, white paper, or how-to article in response to a customer’s problem creates an efficient resolution while also providing valuable information that can serve to increase customer loyalty and even customer conversion.

Bringing it all together

For organisations whose business goals are to increase efficiency, maximise cost-effectiveness, and build customer loyalty, there’s no doubt that increased social media customer service efforts are valuable in achieving these objectives.

Adjusting business processes and implementing new tools can be a burden, but we’re helping companies everyday reach new levels of innovative customer service. Learn more about how you can meet and exceed evolving standards of social media customer support by reaching out to us today.