Customer service or CS, in short, it one of the key lifeline for businesses of any nature. You may well disagree with me (considering the fact that the title of this article is “Customer Service Is The New Social Media Marketing”) and I could totally understand that. However, I hope that this post will change your mindset and look forward to seeing your thoughts in the comment.
For starters, brands are slowly considering social media platforms as a customer service platform. Twitter has introduced the customer service feature in this latest blog post.
If you still need some convincing, the most talked about article on HotInSocialMedia.com is “Clash of Clans Users are Their Marketing Stars“.
Users or customers are great ways to market your business. It can be from responding to their problems or simply, using them to market your business indirectly. The customers are often considered the make-it-or fail for most businesses.
Regardless you like it or not, customers (including myself) felt it is easier to communicate over social media compared to the common tickets and phone calls. You will be surprised that some clients use social media as a way to express their disagreement or unhappiness towards a service or company.
In this post, you will discover how to use social media platforms as a way to enhance the customer service level in your business.
Are you ready to rumble?
Customer Service Is The New Social Media Marketing
1. Not all social media platforms are the same
This is vital. Understanding the different types of social media platforms before you use them for customer support will decide your chance of success or failure.
For example, GoDaddy support team uses Twitter to communicate with their ‘troubled’ customers. They would ask a few questions publicly and after that, more support service will be provided using the Twitter Direct Message (DM).
Now, let’s take Facebook Messenger instead. Do you remember the hype of Facebook Messenger Bot a few weeks back?
Businesses are indeed using Facebook Messenger as a way to communicate not only with their customers, they are using it as a ‘live chat’ support to increase customer satisfaction as well as wooing new customers.
As said above, no two social media platforms are equal. You need to spend sometimes understand all these social media platforms (or the ones of your choice) and work with it.
Only through this way, you will be able to leverage the true potential of the selected social media platform(s).
Generally, not all social media platforms can be used for customer service. For example, it is way harder to leverage platforms such as Pinterest and Instagram for customer service purposes (even though it is possible).
At this point in time, two of the best platforms are Facebook and Twitter.
2. Be responsive to social media (please)
If you are going to use social media as a customer service platform, you have to be really responsive.
For the love of God, your customers will not be happy with you if you are not active on social. At times, recognition is vital because they would give a boost of trust in your customers.
So, what do responsive means in this case?
It simply means that you (or your business) should respond to the engagement earned through social media. They can be in the form of likes, share or even comments. The more you are engaged with them, the better chance you are able to create a lasting effect.
Don’t forget that being active on social publicly would also give you an awesome edge especially in terms of winning sales and increase revenue.
You may dispute that it is easier said than done, and I totally agree with it.
Social media runs 24 hours a day, 7 times a week and 365 days in a year. It is extremely hard to be constantly on the click and the word “extremely” could easily be an understatement.
Generally, customers (social media users) expect a response under 30 minutes. Anything longer than that is often considered ‘slow’.
How to respond on time on social media?
- Using social media tools such as HootSuite and Sprout Social would easily notify you of the updates
- Install social media applications to your smartphones and tablets
- Enable browser notification (only major browsers support this feature)
3. Invite your customers
Ask any customer service representative or agents in the field and they will tell you that customer service job is challenging.
They meet with all types of nasty customers from fussy, rude, hard-headed and much more. After all, what is the odds of reaching out to the customer service just to say “Thank you for the service” right?
So, there is absolutely NO reason why you should make the customer service an even harder one!
You can start by making customer service on social media fun and the easiest way is to invite your happy customers to it.
Ask your customers to follow you on social media and when they like/share/follow you, give it a shout to them! Instead of a plain “thank you”, let the communication flow by asking how’s their day etc. At the end of the day, the ultimate goal is to keep the conversation running for a period of time. Usually, putting it around 10 minutes would be a good margin to start with.
You’ll be surprised that if you are able to make them happy (and solve their problems), they would be very happy to send out happy tweets and posts about you guys. There are some (like me) who will even mention the support team on social media and blog posts just to thank their efforts.
If you want to start customer service on social media, you have to remember that customer service starts from the heart. The associate should be always on the positive side and if done correctly, it will crave a smile on your customer’s faces!
Summary
Businesses should leverage customer service through social media platforms. It is a great way to boost your business and making it different from the rest of your competitors.
Tell me what you think in the comments below.
See also: 11 Things That Successful Social Media Marketers Do Differently
