How Social Media Monitoring Tools Can Help with Customer Service
  • Care

How Social Media Monitoring Tools Can Help with Customer Service

by Khoros Staff | Apr 03, 2018

What’s the quickest way for a social media complaint to escalate to a full-blown brand crisis? When you’re not even aware that the customer has mentioned your brand.

Whether you call it “listening” or “monitoring” it’s a critical component of building relationships and providing exceptional social customer service experiences (read How to Protect Your Brand on Social Media for additional insight).

Customers might contact you any number of ways — not necessarily on the channel you chose. This is where social media monitoring tools can help. They can listen to not just the social platforms you’re active on, but also other social channels for questions and conversations about your brand. Missing a mention, especially a negative one, is likely to lose you a valuable customer quickly. A customer experience report by Harris Interactive® revealed that “82% of consumers in the U.S. said they’ve stopped doing business with a company due to a poor customer service experience."

These are the top 5 ways social media monitoring tools can help take your customer service to the next level:

1. Find vulnerable customers fast.

If you’re an airline, this may be a stranded passenger; if you’re an energy company, it might be someone without heat; and if you’re a clothing company, it might be someone whose package never arrived for a big event. Regardless of why the customer is vulnerable, you need a social media monitoring tool that allows you to recognize these posts and easily prioritize, so they are handled immediately and efficiently.

2. Be proactive with social media.

Identifying meaningful conversations which do not explicitly mention your brand is an excellent way to rebuild trust in a brand where it doesn’t exist anymore. It’s about showing that you can be helpful. Behavioral economics show, by being helpful in these types of situations, if presented with your brand in the future, you will be perceived in a more favorable light. British Gas used this strategy to build relationships with key influencers and stakeholders, resulting in a +5 impact on their brand sentiment score.

3. Share customer conversations.

When your frontline team has the ability through a social media monitoring tool to share customer conversations across your organization, and pull in the right resources quickly and efficiently, they will be able to deliver high-quality customer experiences on every conversation. By tapping into subject matter experts across your organization to assist with customer issues, agents can provide more complete responses in less time, ultimately driving higher customer satisfaction ratings.

4. Check out the competition.

Monitor your competition to learn what’s working and not working with their audience so you can avoid the same customer service pitfalls. You can now benchmark your Facebook response rate against your competitors by checking out the percentage response rate on their Facebook pages. Facebook offers a “very responsive to messages badge” which shows which Pages respond quickly and consistently to private messages. To get the badge, your Page must have achieved a response rate of 90% and a response time of 15 minutes over the last seven days.

5. Demonstrate thought leadership.

By listening for relevant mentions about your industry through a social media monitoring tool, then offering helpful advice, you’re demonstrating that you’re an expert in your field and that you’re approachable. Customers and prospects will be more likely to reach out to your brand when they have a question or concern.

Bonus Tip:

If you have a large customer base, especially one that’s international, you should be monitoring social media 24/7. But if that’s not feasible or necessary, it’s important to communicate directly on your social media profiles when you are (and aren’t) available with an alternate way to contact support staff.

Share This Article

Drive brand communities

Learn how to avoid a customer service crisis:

How to Protect Your Brand on Social Media Whitepaper