Earlier, when there was no internet, telephones were the fastest and most effective way of providing customer services. However, with the growing usage of the internet, companies started offering customer services via emails. Gradually, social media interactions became the best way to connect with a brand. Businesses also started offering social media customer services via channels that customers use frequently. Let’s have a look at some of the key stats related to the growing popularity of social media customer care services.
Stats why social media customer service is important?
1 out of 3 social media users would prefer using social media customer services instead of a telephone or email service.
More than 65% of customers use social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, and other social media networks to seek resolutions to their issues.
If a business can establish meaningful social media connections, about 75% of people are likely to post something positive about the brand.
By getting a positive and satisfactory social media customer service experience, about 70% of customers will likely recommend the brand to others.
Customers are likely to spend 20 to 40% more if a business engages and responds to them via social media.
About 30% of consumers would switch to a competitor if the original company fails to respond to their social media messages.
Solving customer issues on social media channels is about 12 times cheaper than solving it by telephone or any other medium.
About Social Media Customer Service
So what exactly social media customer service is? Well, it is an act of offering automated and live customer service and support via various popular social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. This type of customer service allows customers to connect directly with a particular brand via their personal social media profiles whenever they have a query or an issue.
Social media interactions can take place in two ways:
Publicly: A tag in a Twitter post, a post on a Facebook wall, a comment on the Instagram page, etc.
Privately: By sending direct messages.
Nowadays, a large number of customers prefer reaching out to customer service via social media channels due to the ease and expediency that these channels offer. It also helps them to prevent lengthy IVR phone menus, waiting to get directed to a particular support link, etc.
Best Practices for Improved Social Media Customer Service
Looking at the growing usage of social media channels to get customer services, businesses must focus their attention on implementing the best practices to provide superior social media customer services to their customers. Here is the list of some of the best practices for social media customer service:
Get to know the most preferred platforms of your customers: Businesses must avoid offering social media customer service on each social media platform, instead they must identify the social media channels that customers are using. This will help businesses to focus their resources and strategies on those channels and allocate their agents so that no comments, tags, or messages get overlooked. It also makes it easier for the customers to find a business’s customer service. To identify the channels that customers use most, businesses can run a survey or create accounts on multiple platforms to look where the most interactions take place.
Create a separate social media account for customer service: These days, businesses use social media channels for various purposes like marketing, interacting with influencers, brand-building, connecting with customers, listing products and services for sale, and many others. To create the best possible customer service experience, businesses need to create a separate social media account explicitly for customer service queries or interactions. Using separate accounts will help businesses to focus entirely on their customer’s issues and they will not miss out on any questions, issues, or needs of their customers due to various other social media activities like posting ads, likes, shares, and more.
Provide quick support using chatbots and canned responses: Today’s customers want a quick response to their queries. More than 60% of customers expect a response to their social media customer service query within an hour of posting the query. However, it might not be possible for businesses to have their representatives available every time to respond to their customer’s queries across multiple social media channels. To deal with such situations, businesses can make use of chatbots. Automated chatbots with pre-written responses to various commonly asked queries on social media channels can help businesses to respond to their customer’s commonly asked queries quickly. This way, businesses can easily meet their customer’s expectations without making their team engaged.
Provide additional support options: No doubt, social media is an important medium to deliver customer service, it should not be the only option for customers to receive customer service. Therefore, whenever a business connects with its customers via any social media platform, it must offer other support options as well. For instance, businesses must provide information about customer/support service hours, customer service phone numbers, business website links, customer service email addresses, etc.
These are some of the best practices that today’s businesses must implement in their social media strategy to get the best possible results. When used in the best possible manner, social media channels can help businesses to offer superior social media customer services and create a loyal base of customers for the long term.
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