Social Media-Powered Customer Service

In the age of social media, customer service now happens as often on platforms like Facebook and X as it does through other forms of communication, including phone and email. Because social media gives anyone the ability to post their own content and commentary publicly online, business owners are privy to customer feedback that is no longer limited to a private phone conversation.

This exposure can feel daunting, especially if the comments are complaints, but with the right process and tools in place, providing customer service on social networks can help your company in several ways:

1. You may be able to identify and resolve issues more quickly.
2. You could build or rebuild trust and loyalty.
3. You may even be able to repair or bolster your company’s reputation.

There is no magic bullet when it comes to social media marketing. However, understanding how consumers, customers, and prospects are using social media to communicate their feelings about your company, products, or services can help you provide more timely customer service.

Establishing a process

Before you start purchasing software and subscribing to new online tools, plan out a customer service process that can incorporate new tools and capabilities while taking into consideration your current capacity or the capacity of your team.

Your process should be based on your business goals, needs, and resources and can include activities such as:

Listening - Pulling in messages and comments from multiple platforms into a single collective inbox instead of having to go to each social network to access them.

Categorizing and tagging - Sorting comments by topics or keywords for organizational and reporting purposes.

Responding - Communicating via private direct messaging or publicly in comments.

Assigning - Providing tasks to team members to handle specific comments or messages.

Resolving - Tracking the communications around comments or messages and noting the outcomes.

Reporting - Generating reports such as top categories or topics to understand what customers are saying and to identify their pain points.

Social media customer service involves paying attention, responding in a timely manner, and being able to address issues to the best of your ability and hopefully to the satisfaction of the customer.

Picking the right tool

The tool you choose for social media-powered customer service should facilitate key aspects of your process while streamlining the steps and tasks involved. Social media management platforms, such as Sprout Social or Hootsuite, can usually handle most of the typical customer service activities in addition to planning, scheduling, and publishing content.

Some additional features that you might find on social media management platforms include:

Saved searches - Using keywords to identify relevant conversations and saving the searches to review and respond.

Response library - A repository of canned responses that you can create and use for commonly asked questions.

Sentiment analysis - Typically compiled and analyzed by artificial intelligence and labeled as Positive, Negative, or Neutral.

Assisted response - Another feature using artificial intelligence to provide potential responses to messages or comments.

While you can use full-featured social media management tools to handle your customer service activities, you could opt to use social media-powered Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools, such as Monday CRM and Zoho CRM, instead. These tools typically do not provide content planning or publishing features, but focus more on managing customer communications and tracking conversations from complaint to resolution.

Best practices

A good foundation for providing customer service through social media is to have policies in place for handling complaints such as a return policy, refund policy, and how to handle security or fraud issues. Being prepared with clear steps to take when issues arise helps you handle things more efficiently and effectively.

Being on the front lines of customer comments and messages can be daunting, especially if you’re seeing more complaints than compliments. Don’t take complaints personally but instead look at them as opportunities to turn unhappy customers into satisfied ones.

Respond in a timely manner, and if you don’t have an answer right away, acknowledge that you’ve received a customer’s message or have seen their comment and are working on addressing it. Most people who complain online want to be heard so a prompt, polite acknowledgement can set the stage for a more successful interaction and result.

Keep track of each conversation and analyze the outcomes from your customer interactions. You can learn a lot from customer compliments and even more from customer complaints.