The article “Using Social Media to Bring Your Customer Service and Marketing Teams Together” by Michael Lundberg says that providing bad customer service or even no customer service on social media is unacceptable. Nearly half of customers who contact companies via social media expect their issues resolved in less than one hour. Unfortunately, many companies aren’t taking their social media channels seriously when it comes to delivering high-quality customer experiences. For companies who wish to better their online customer experience, Lundberg offers seven keys for providing high-quality social media customer service.
1) Humanize Your Brand: Companies often have stock/scripted responses to customer inquiries, but this isn’t as welcomed on social media channels as it is in traditional customer communication. People on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter don’t want to hear sales jargon or stiff language; they want to communicate with you in a casual, conversational tone. The more personal your social media representatives are, the happier your customers will be.
2) Respond Quickly: Lundberg states that 42% of consumers on social media expect a resolution in less than 60 minutes, and many would still like to have their issues resolved in less than 30 minutes. As with traditional call center agents, social media representative should strive to respond and resolve as close to immediately as possible. Like it or not, we’re in the era of instant gratification, and customers expect it from the companies they support.
3) Help On the Right Channels: It happens quite often: a customer asks a question on a social media channel and they receive a response via phone call or email. People don’t like to be transferred constantly to different agents and departments when they’re calling a traditional call center and it’s the same for when they contact your company on social media. The key is to be consistent with your communication. In other words, if a customer asks you for help on Twitter, respond to them on Twitter.
4) Go Above and Beyond: To earn customer loyalty from people, employees must do anything they can to make sure the customer is happy. It’s not enough to simply answer inquiries; you have to give a personalized response that makes the customer feel like they’re a significant person to your company.
5) Set Up Alerts and Speak Their Language: Agents should be constantly doing social listening for customer comments. This can be accomplished by creating social media communities specifically for your company.
6) Gauge Customer Happiness: No matter how bad the opinions could get, it’s important to gather every opinion you can from the social media community regarding your company. This allows you to set up metrics showing how your customers feel about your company and enables you to focus on how you can improve your product or service.
7) Make Helpful Suggestions and Point Back to Your Brand: Not every company can provide 24/7 customer service; it’s just a reality. However, you can provide information to your customers to help point them in the right direction. For example, putting your hours of operation in an obvious, visible part of your website or social media pages can help establish realistic customer expectations. Another option is to have links to the social media pages of individual contacts within your company who are more readily available during off hours.
This blog post was based on an article from Multichannel Merchant. To read the original article, please click the link below:
Using Social Media to Bring Your Customer Service and Marketing Teams Together – Michael Lundberg
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