Customer Service and Social Media – Improve your audience relationship
When businesses talk about social media, they usually focus on improving your brand awareness, reaching new clients, and connecting with your audience. However, they often forget very practical things businesses can do with social media. One of which is customer service.
Social media is a powerful platform for customer service, as long as you know how to use it and analyze it. And that’s where we come in. We want to show you how businesses use social media for customer service and how Sotrender can help you get the most out of it.
Businesses love sharing news about their latest products, attaching appealing, pretty photos or videos to their brand, and interacting with users. While all of this is great and benefits your brand, people know all about that already. Others have written about it, we’ve written about. But customer service on social media is something that doesn’t get the attention it rightly deserves.
Customer service and social media
Here’s why you should consider using social media for your customer service:
- Respond instantly. Social media is all about people sharing and reacting to each other almost instantly. Using platforms like Facebook and Twitter, you can instantly respond to your customers needs or requests. Your clients will appreciate not racking up a phone bill just trying to contact you.
- It’s simple. Social media has a global average penetration rate of 31%. As of late 2016, Facebook has 1.86 billion monthly active users. That means most of your users probably have it. Things become much easier for you and for them when you can resolve their issues without them having to call you, create an account for your site, or use a less popular service.
- Connect with users organically. Social media is a natural method of communication for most people. Just look at all the people are glued to their phones and social media apps, no matter where they go. Offering your customer service through it will make your users more comfortable.
- Take complaints privately. A lot of people complain about products and brands publicly on social media. If your customer service team uses Facebook or Twitter, you can address these problems directly and ask them to discuss their complaints privately. This way, you help your customer and you quickly prevent them from spreading too much negativity about your product, service, or brand.
- Turn complaints into unique improvements. Clients can offer tons of insight on social media that you won’t get elsewhere. You can use it to improve your product/service, or get inspired to do something special for your customers.
That’s the simple sum of it. But this doesn’t mean that you should abandon all other customer service methods. The more ways customers can contact you, the better!
Analyzing your customer service
Sotrender analyzes your social media performance in tons of different areas. And one of those is your customer service. We look at a few different metrics to see how your customer service is doing, which are:
Response rate. See how often you reply to your user’s posts. The lower the percent, the less you respond to them. If it gets too low, you need to start doing more.
Response time. How long it took your brand to respond to a user. You’ll want to respond as quickly as possible, keeping your audience satisfied. That is, as long as you know how to appropriately deal with their issues.
Negative feedback. Check how much negative feedback you’re getting from users. We count users hiding a post, hiding all posts, reporting spam, or unliking a page as negative feedback. This helps you identify what actions on social media your users don’t like, and where you should focus your customer service on.
Community ranking. See which users are active on your page, along with the segment they belong to. Are users likers, only liking your page, or are they debaters, engaging more on your content. If you know how your audience reacts, you will know what to prepare for them.
And don’t forget about Sotrender’s Fanpage and Twitter Trends UK reports! That’s where you’ll get tons of insightful data about customer service from brands across 11 unique industries.
Social media customer service done right
Here are some examples of brand’s doing customer service well on social media. Use it as inspiration should you implement customer service into your social media activities.
Nike responds quickly, politely, and helpfully.
Jet Blue takes customer complaints seriously and shows they want to take action.
Xbox takes their social media seriously. Informative, set hours, and a large team to answer client needs.
Original Article by Kinga Odziemek, Sotrender