The rise of social media has completely changed the relationship that customers have with businesses by opening up a direct, constantly-available communication channel.
Despite this, however, the overall standards of social customer service aren’t especially impressive, with US consumers ranking social media second-last among all customer service channels by ease of use.
Developing the quality of your social customer service can be a fantastic way to gain an edge over the competition and develop customer loyalty through online channels.
If you’re looking to improve your audience’s experience when interacting with your brand on social media, here’s six best practices for achieving better social customer service.
1. Set Up Dedicated Social Customer Service Profiles
There are many reasons why a notification might pop up on your brand’s social media account. From comments on posts to new content from your followed accounts to updates from groups you’re a part of, your social media marketing team is always going to have something to look at and respond to.
If you manage your social customer service through a single branded account, important customer service issues can easily get lost in all the other “pings” that your social media team have to keep up with, which could delay response times and drag down the customer experience.
By setting up a dedicated social customer service profile and directing your audience to use this for any issues they’re having, you can separate your customer service tickets and help your support team deal with them more efficiently, without neglecting activity on your main account.
Aside from this, maintaining a support account can give you a great place to share tips for fixing common issues or using your products, helping your customers resolve problems by themselves and saving time for your support team.
2. Monitor Brand Sentiment
Effective social customer service starts with understanding the way customers perceive your brand, anticipating their main pain points, and taking steps to proactively address these in your approach to customer service.
Manually trawling comments and discussions on your social media platforms to highlight recurring themes simply isn’t practical for most brands. Fortunately, however, there are a range of tools like Highperformr that can be used to automatically track how your audience is interacting with your brand, the kind of content that’s getting the most interactions, and common themes shared by your brand mentions.
By using these tools to keep a close eye on how your audience feels about your brand, particularly their pain points, you’ll be able to keep your customer service agents updated on the key issues faced by your customers, and the steps you’re taking to remedy these problems.
3. Monitor Time-to-Response
The quality of your social customer service responses will always be more important than how fast you respond to queries.
Having said that, staying aware of the time you’re taking to respond to customer service tickets, and taking steps to minimize this timeframe, is still going to be a major contributor to achieving better customer service.
By monitoring time-to-response and setting clear targets for your customer service team, you’ll be able to show your customers that they matter to you, and resolve their issues as fast as practically possible.
Aside from this, minimizing your time-to-respond will reduce the risk of customers getting impatient and making an issue worse by airing their frustrations publicly on social media.
4. Have a Tone of Voice Guide, But Don’t Forget to Personalize
Having a consistent tone of voice across multiple touchpoints is a fundamental cornerstone of good branding, and this is just as true for customer service as it is for your more public social media content.
When approaching your social customer service, make sure anyone who’s going to be in direct contact with your customers is sticking to a specific tone of voice, defined by variables such as:
- Level of formality, based on the use of slang, emojis, and how you’re addressing the customer.
- The cultural nuances of your different geographic markets, and how customer service agents should adjust their tone to suit these.
- Guidance on how to deal with customer frustrations.
While it’s important to use a distinct tone of voice as part of your social customer service, remember that your customers are going to want to see that you’re approaching them as individuals, and responding to their unique issues.
When you’re distributing TOV docs and training customer service agents, remember to emphasize that they should always personalize their responses to the specific customer, and avoid delivering impersonal, “canned” responses that could undermine your relationship with your customer base.
5. Create and Use an Escalation Management Strategy
An escalation management strategy will help you rank your social customer service tickets based on the type and severity of an issue, prioritize your social customer service resources, and secure more positive outcomes for your customers.
Some systems of categorization for an SaaS escalation management strategy might include:
Issue severity, covering tickets for critical issues that mean they can’t use the most basic features of your product, moderate issues like common technical bugs, and minor issues like general enquiries or feature requests.
Issue type, such as technical difficulties, onboarding issues, or account issues like billing, permissions, and data access.
Customer segment, such as enterprise, SMB, or partner.
Implementing an escalation management strategy to organize your support tickets will give you a methodical way to solve your most pressing issues first, while making sure that each issue is assigned to the customer service agent who’s best equipped to deal with it.
6. Be Proactive, Rather Than Reactive
The more your customer base grows, the more likely you are to see a high volume of social customer service messages popping up in your CRM.
Dealing with these requests can become a major drain on your resources, so it’s crucial to take a proactive approach to supporting your audience, and giving customers the resources they need to help themselves.
Be sure to regularly review your customer service logs and highlight any issues that are being mentioned more often than others, then work to create educational content such as FAQs and how-to videos that teach your customers how to get around common problems themselves.
When your customers are prompted to use these resources to solve their problems, you’ll be able to free up a lot of bandwidth for your social customer service agents which can be focused on more severe and pressing issues that require direct intervention.
Aside from this, preventing the most common issues facing customers will improve the overall experience customers have with your product, and empower them to get the most from their buyer experience without the need for outside support.
Crafting Better Social Customer Service
When you’re managing an online community for a growing brand, maintaining high standards of social customer service can make all the difference to the experience of your customers and the way your brand is perceived online.
By monitoring the right metrics, implementing effective policies, and taking a proactive approach, you’ll be able to secure your brand’s reputation and more positive customer relationships.
For more support with monitoring the conversations around your brand and developing your customer experience, sign up to Highperformr for free today!
