7 Powerful Social Media Customer Care Tips

Any modern business that has an online segment to its operations, like an e-shopping platform, should establish a social media presence as well. People are so used to social media that they literally expect the company’s customer care service to have an account on the platform they use. In a world that is sped up, customer care should be available 24/7 via social media chats. However, it is not merely enough to open several accounts and assign a person to them, as these 7 powerful tips will help you create the ultimate social media customer care service.

Commenting on the Comments

One of the most problematic aspects of owning a social media account, even for personal users, is the comments section. Here people are free to write whatever they want and they really do leave all sorts of illogical comments. Handling both the good and the bad comments is an art of sorts in digital marketing. Your customer care agents need to deal both with positive comments, genuine questions and inquiries, negative reviews, and outright trolling and spamming. The latter categories ought to be ignored, while the rest of the comments need to be divided into categories and agents should be instructed on how to handle them.

Speed is Everything

We spoke about the importance of speed and prompt replies on social media are highly valued by customers. Do you know of that responsiveness category on Facebook? Well, if a customer sees a bright green inscription “responds within minutes,” they will be more likely to ask the question. If they do get a truthful reply after 10 minutes, they will have a higher confidence level in your franchise. This promptness is achieved by rotating duties inside your customer care team, so there is at least one person free to answer message on social media at all times.

Going Pro

One of the biggest mistakes managers, entrepreneurs, and business owners make is to take their social media presence lightly. Don’t become one of those people who leniently think that they can post on social media on their own to save money on hiring extra staff. Social media platforms are a big thing today and unless you delegate or hire at least one person to handle these accounts, you are in for a disappointment. If you are not using stock photos on your website but have gone through the effort to hire a professional photographer, why shouldn’t you have a professional approach to your company’s social media presence?

A Single Support Channel

More is not always better in digital marketing. Namely, if you open tens of accounts on social media, your customers will have ease of access to information but this will cause a headache to your support team because 55% of all customers head first to social media to complain. Your staff will be forced to fight a battle on several fronts, with a single customer sending the same inquiry on Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat, for example. In order to prevent this digital bottleneck from forming, you should direct customers to a single customer support channel. In most cases, this is a single e-mail address that is easily accessed through a contact form on the business’s website through a call-to-action button.

Learn on the Go

There is no university for the Internet, so your marketers will have to learn from experience. This is how most FAQ sections on websites are formed, from thousands of similar questions customers have sent over the years. You can use the most common questions (and answers to them) to establish protocols that will help automate the reply process and speed things up. Apart from recording the most frequently asked questions, it is equally important to take notice of the best responses and record them. In fact, you could establish a reward for those employees who come up with the most useful answers. This will serve as additional motivation for them to contribute to your customer care strategy.

Be Realistic

The whole point of establishing a social media customer care service is to be able to assist customers quickly and realistically. The agents should be polite but they should not lie nor give false promises to customers. The answers you provide need to be honest because disappointing your clients is worse than having them wait a day for a proper solution to their problem. You should nurture the virtue of transparency which implies explaining in detail why the problem is taking so long to resolve. By keeping the customer up to date, you are ensuring their satisfaction, as they are more than grateful for being brief.

Monitor your Brand

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Hashtags and mentions have made it easy to keep track of what your clients and prospective clients are saying about you on social media. However, people tend to write negative reviews without directly mentioning you or even tagging your business. Just imagine, there could be negative reviews in cyberspace that you are completely unaware of!

This is where brand monitoring comes into play. Social media monitoring tools such as Brand24 and Mention are based on the principle of searching keywords. In general, these tools track up to 12 social media platforms but you can always double this number if you pay extra. If you’re a freelance photographer, then you might search keywords like “photo,” “session,” “flash,” etc. Once your brand gets a mention using keywords, the app immediately notifies you so you can immediately engage in a conversation with the clientele.

It’s Personal

Although social media platforms appear like an ideal billboard for marketing, their main purpose is to connect people on a highly personal level. Your customer care should assume the same stance and agents should not restrain themselves from addressing customers by their first name. This way, a better rapport is established and customers like the fact that they know the person they are chatting to by their given name as well.

Finally, you need to take social media branding seriously. Only then will you be able to successfully implement the 7 tips we have listed here. Once customers discover this easy way to communicate with your customer care service, you will experience a rise in the quality of feedback you receive.