How to Turn Social Media into a Powerful Customer Service Tool

Whether a customer is raving about your new product, or raging about a missed opportunity to delight them, they’re most likely doing it on social media. And since social platforms have enormous reach and visibility, how you respond to customers’ queries and complaints can make all the difference. Quick and thoughtful responses can help you build trust and integrity not just with your customers but with wider audiences on social media. So, don’t miss the opportunity to use social channels for customer support. Not only are they great for marketing your offerings, but they also serve as a direct platform to provide excellent, personalised, and round-the-clock service.

Harnessing social platforms to offer superior customer service

The number of social media users is expected to reach 4.41 billion by 2025. These users value digital-first experiences – ease of access, speed, and connectedness. This presents a massive opportunity for businesses to serve their customers where they are in the shortest time possible.

Here are some broad ways you can benefit from offering customer service through social platforms:

• Meet customers where they are: Make it easier for customers to reach you. Being present on social media platforms, where today’s customers already are, will encourage higher engagement. For example, Twitter and Facebook have the largest number of 25-34 year old users. If your target audience falls in this age group and frequents Facebook, consider setting up a live chat function for your business page to address customer queries and requests for their convenience.

• Enable one-on-one interactions with customers: Through social media, you can create accessible, direct channels for customers to reach out to you from anywhere, at any time. You get to engage with hundreds and thousands of customers on a personal level. When customers reach out to your brand on social media, it allows you to solve their issues more creatively and humanely. This can help increase customer satisfaction, building customer loyalty and advocacy.

• Speed up response time: You can get notified of engagement or activities related to your brand on social media so you can respond immediately. Set up chatbots to tackle simple, routine cases, and route complex cases to the right service agents for faster resolution across the board.

• Get free access to a wealth of feedback: Many customers voluntarily leave feedback for brands on social media. They may also discuss your brand with a friend, or post words of praise. These activities generate valuable, real-time data about how audiences perceive your brand and the changes they’d like to see. Capturing customer feedback through social media is much easier and faster than through emails or phone calls. Social customer service also builds user-generated content (UGC) that can help other people make better buying decisions. Product and service teams can leverage all this knowledge to plug possible gaps in your customer experience.

• Build a positive brand image: Customer referrals and testimonies are extremely powerful tools. So, when customers share a positive account of their service experiences through social media, that can influence more people to like your brand and possibly turn into new customers. When you actively support your customers on social media, it shows everyone that you are genuinely interested in delivering exceptional experiences.

• Play with the USPs of different platforms: Depending on the social media platforms you choose, you have the option to interact with customers in different ways. For instance, Twitter allows easy replies.. WhatsApp supports both live chat and chatbots for faster case resolution at any time of the day. Facebook automatically shows a ‘very responsive’ badge on your company profile if you have a 90% or more response rate, and your usual response time is less than 5 minutes. Such features can help you creatively solve customer issues (and get recognised for that).

Because engagement and creativity are high on social media, customer service through these platforms is more complex than through traditional service channels like call centres and emails. To ace your social customer service game, you will need to recognise the differences in servicing through different social media platforms, and then build the right strategies and tactics for each.

Here are some tips to help you get started and build your servicing capabilities on social:

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Streamline social service processes, improve customer satisfaction

Offering excellent social customer service across platforms requires a mix of intelligent workflows, proactive responses, and personalisation tactics. Salesforce combines the power of Service Cloud and Social Studio to deliver seamless customer service across social media platforms. With Service Cloud Social Networks, you can:

• Directly convert requests on social media into service cases to support customers on their favourite social networks
• Get a comprehensive view of the customer with Salesforce Customer 360 before you respond, to have personalised and contextual service interactions in real-time
• Use keywords, classifiers, and language detection to ensure that agents always get actionable posts to work the right issues in the right way.
• Integrate social media with other service channels like calls and emails to offer customers a truly omnichannel service experience