While it’s true that modern, digital-savvy consumers increasingly prefer to use self-service options (like FAQs or AI chatbots) to get answers to their questions or resolve issues independently, self-service isn’t the right solution for every single interaction. Many customer support requests (especially complex ones) require a human touch and a deeper level of personalization.
That’s why – even though consumers highly appreciate brands that offer self-service options – many still want the ability to interact with a human rep. And they often go to social media channels to reach out to a live customer service representative. In this article, we’ll talk about the importance of delivering customer service and support on social media and provide some best practices on how to do it effectively.
If you aren’t yet sure whether you should be supporting your customers across social media channels, there are basically two major reasons why it’s becoming mandatory for businesses these days:
First and foremost, consumers want to be able to engage with brands across different communication channels, and numerous studies have proven that. For example, according to Salesforce research, 71% of customers prefer using different channels based on the context.
Salesforce also found that B2B buyers engage with companies across ten channels, while B2C consumers typically use eight. And there are many benefits of omnichannel communication for customer service for both customers and brands, such as improved customer experience and reduced support costs, to name just a few.
Secondly, social media usage is on the rise. Based on the Digital 2024 Global Overview Report, there are now more than 5 billion active social media user identities. It means that over half of the world’s population is already on social media. And according to Salesforce, over 64% of consumers choose social media to engage with brands.
On top of that, responding to your customers on social media isn’t just a way to extend your customer support options. It’s also an excellent way to improve customer loyalty. Data from SproutSocial revealed that 63% of consumers agree their loyalty to a brand is greatly influenced by the quality of customer support they provide on social media.
Let’s now outline some of the best practices for delivering omnichannel social media customer service:
You don’t necessarily need to be present on all the popular social media channels – the key is to maintain a presence on the channels your customers are actively using. Are they more active on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, or any other social media channels? One of the quickest and easiest ways to learn more about your customers’ social media behavior is to ask them about their preferences through customer surveys or feedback forms.
Whatever channel your customers use to reach out to your brand when they have questions or issues, they naturally expect to get a quick response. Social media is no exception. So, how quickly do consumers expect a response from brands on social media? Based on research from Sprout Social, 30% expect to get a response on the same day, 23% expect a response within 1-2 hours, 16% expect a response within minutes, and only 12% said response time doesn’t matter to them. Though you might not always be able to respond immediately, the good rule of thumb here is to respond as quickly as you possibly can.
In addition to responding to direct messages and comments, it’s also essential to track and timely respond to your brand mentions. There are many social listening tools like Hootsuite, Sprout Social, or Sprinklr that allow you to do just that. This is particularly important when your customers share their negative experiences with your brand because unaddressed negative mentions can quickly escalate into larger issues. And that can negatively impact your brand reputation.
On the other side, responding publicly to a negative comment in a professional way can help you improve your brand image and turn an unhappy customer into a loyal one.
As already mentioned above, providing a public response to a complaint or a negative comment can go a long way in helping you win over an unhappy customer, but not every interaction on social media should be public. Sometimes, it’s best to move the conversation out of the public’s view. These are particularly the cases when the situation requires in-depth back-and-forth communication or when a customer needs to share sensitive personal information.
By integrating an AI chatbot, you can actually turn your social media into a self-service channel. Luckily, there are many AI-driven chatbot solutions that integrate with Facebook, Instagram, and other social media channels. You can train an AI chatbot on your internal knowledge sources, enabling it to guide your customers to the information they are looking for, answer FAQs, and handle basic requests while ensuring more complex requests and those issues that require a human touch are escalated to human agents.
Using a single omnichannel customer engagement platform that allows you to integrate multiple social media and other digital communication channels is one of the best investments in your social customer service strategy. With a single solution, your customer service team can easily track and manage interactions across all the integrated channels from a single unified inbox, ensuring that no conversation is left unattended.
As more and more customer service interactions are happening in the digital space, delivering customer service and support on social media is becoming the norm for businesses – and consumers have come to expect that. With the right tools and strategy, you can provide efficient customer support across your social media channels and turn even negative comments into something positive for your brand, strengthening your brand reputation, trust, and customer relationships.
The Social Hire team never just do social media.
What the Social Hire gang loves is making a difference for our clients, and we don't want to waste your, or our resources on campaigns that aren't right for your organisation, if it doesn't get your organisation the difference you need - we take a different approach. When your business utilises social media management, Social Hire get your brand the exposure it needs and offer your business the lift it needs to improve.
The social media marketers in our company are the best in the business at helping our partners enhance their online marketing. We outline and implement cutting-edge social media marketing plans that help our customers realise their organisational objectives and further their social media presence. Our experienced team of digital experts do your social media strategy creation and management in an uncomplicated monthly plan that is cost-effective and is genuinely useful, whatever results you demand from your online marketing management.
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