If you’re a business but not on social media already, then you need to be. If you already have social media presence, it’s important that you are active and responsive.
Social media is an extremely important customer service tool—in fact your most important customer service tool these days—here’s why:
Social Media Puts You Where your Customers Are
It seems that everyone has their eyes glued to their phone these days, even if they’re at the movie theater or in the middle of a conversation. You can do so much through social media.
Many businesses even have 24/7 social media support. Plus, now with the ability to add unique pages, you can even upload shops and menus on Facebook. With about 80% of all internet users being active on at least one social media platform, it is the key to being in touch with your customers.
Their likes and comments give you valuable insights and can help you position your brand better. But you need to be very active on the platform as today’s customers are spoiled. They want quick response. For example, 72% of customers complaining via Twitter expect a response within 2 hours of posting a tweet.
This puts a lot of pressure on brands but this pressure can help them improve their customer service.
Social Media Lets You Hear What your Customers Have to Say
Getting customer feedback can be hard. It shouldn’t be, but sometimes it is. You can send out surveys and ask for responses, but people don’t always want to take the time to provide the information you’re asking for. What’s even more difficult is that happy or satisfied customers don’t always fill out surveys or give feedback—unsatisfied customers do, though, which makes it difficult to really gauge what your customers have to say about you and get real feedback.
Giving feedback on social media is typically quicker and simpler than filling out a survey or responding to a questionnaire. Customers even give feedback voluntarily—without solicitation. When you’re on social media, you’ll be able to get a better idea of what you’re doing right and what your customers want to see improved, so that you can make adjustments and increase your customers’ satisfaction.
Social Media Helps You Respond to Customer Complaints More Quickly
Customers will use social media to complain about everything—they complain about their frustrations with work, they complain about their crazy relatives, and they complain about poor customer service or bad experiences with brands on social media. Not only will they complain to their friends and followers, but they also use social media as a way to connect with brands since social media can be used to return a quick response.
As much as you might like never getting complaints at all, that’s not the way life works, so you can use social media and the fact that customers use it as a place to complain to your advantage. When a customer mentions you or shoots you a direct message, you can respond within minutes rather than having an employee sort through a general inbox and use their best discretion to get feedback and complaints to the right departments.
Social Media Lets You Engage Your Customers
Engagement is an extremely important aspect of building a brand, a customer community, and developing trust and loyalty between you and your customers. Getting engagement offline and when they’re not in your store can be difficult, though.
Social media lets you engage with your customers almost constantly—you can run giveaways, offer BOGO deals, ask questions about your products (or even questions that are just for fun), feature customer testimonials, and so much more. Engagement is huge and social media lets you keep your customers almost always engaged with your brand.
Social Media Gives You More Control Over Your Image
People are going to say what they say about you, whether it be true, false, or based on a one-time experience that doesn’t represent your company accurately. It can be frustrating when you can’t do much about it but hope that nobody else sees the less-than-wonderful things customers and former customers might say about you.
When you’re on social media, you have more control over your image than just sitting back and hoping—you can respond quickly to complaints; you can address issues right away in threads; you can issue apologies; and you can publish posts and share content that helps show your brand in a positive light and portray the quality of your products and help you better control your image.
If you’re not using social media as a customer service tool, you may not be providing the best customer service possible. Use your social media pages to their full extent, engage with customers, and provide them the best experience possible.