Guide to Improving Customer Experience on Social Media

How do we ensure our customers get the best experience on our social media platforms?

If you’re asking a question like this, you’re not alone. Several businesses, irrespective of their size, try to build memorable customer service experience using their social platforms.

Giants like Starbucks are known for their presence on social media platforms like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and others. But rather than being famous for their lucrative offers, they caught everyone’s attention for building a customer support experience on social platforms.

From being open to customer criticism to simply interacting with them on daily basis, Starbuck sets the right examples for a lot of businesses to follow through. While there’s a lot to learn from such brands, simply looking at one won’t help you create a memorable customer support experience for your consumers. You must look into other ways to improve your overall customer experience on social media platforms.

With our quick guide, you’ll explore 10+ ways to improve your customer support experience on social platforms, along with examples and a list of tools to benefit your business.

Without further delays, let’s dive in.

While we’ve understood how Starbucks was open to criticism and helping customers identify the right coffee options, there are other things that you can do on social media platforms to create the right customer experience. Let’s dive into our list of strategies below.

Identify Your Audience

Who is my audience?

Are they active on social media? Have they previously approached our business with a request or a complaint on social channels?

You need answers to these crucial questions before diving deep into social media strategies. If they are frequent social media users, understand the following:

• Who do they follow regularly?
• What do they share or like normally?
• Do they share their experiences on social channels?

Identifying basic habits can help you structure your social media efforts that lead to better experiences for customers.

Pick the Right Social Media Channel

With a better understanding of your audience, you can start choosing the right social media channel for your business. While many businesses prefer using multiple channels simultaneously to stay connected to their audience, it may be different in your case.

For example, if you run a SaaS business, you need to opt for social media channels like LinkedIn and Instagram to share updates about your business with the audience.

But if you run an eCommerce business, the channels may change. You can opt for social channels like Instagram, Facebook, and even Pinterest to share your latest product range or inform customers about your upcoming sales in advance.

You must pick the right social media channel based on the nature of your business and what channels your audience uses frequently.

Gather Feedback

What are your customers thinking? Are they satisfied with your business? Do they like coming back to your brand?

To get answers to these questions, you must capture their feedback on a regular basis. By gathering feedback, you can understand the following:

• Are they satisfied with the answers you provide to them in case they have doubts about your product?
• Do they find a solution on time, or do they have to wait for hours or even days to hear back from your brand?
• Were they happy with the purchase, or did your product meet their expectations?

You can get a clear estimate of whether your services have successfully satisfied your customers or not. To capture their feedback on social media platforms, you can:

Interact with customers on their comments.

Send direct messages with feedback links.

Use social media monitoring tools like Statusbrew to understand how customers have discussed your brand positively and negatively.

Capture feedback via an online survey and gift discount coupons or special giveaways to those who fill out the form first.

Once the feedback is captured, you need to ensure that it gets shared with respective teams and that it gets implemented to improve the customer experience in the future.

Read More: 7 Ways To Use Customer Reviews To Grow Your Business

Stay Positive

Customers can be harsh when their experience isn’t great with your brand. But that’s the time when you need to respond to them positively and ensure their experience doesn’t spoil further.

For example, look at how patient California Tortilla was when dealing with a miffed customer. They apologized and guided them to the right person who could resolve their problem faster.

Respond ASAP

*Did you know that 42% of customers complaining on social media expect a 60-minute response time? *

Customers prefer prompt responses from each brand they engage with. And they even know that brands today have the capability of responding faster. But if they end up waiting more than the expected time, you can ruin their experience altogether.

That’s why it is important that you focus on responding faster, even if they reach out to you on social media platforms. Like many brands, you can consider using chatbots on your social platforms to respond promptly to customers. This way, they don’t have to wait for hours or days to hear back from you. This may encourage customers to frequently return to your brand for more services.

Take Advantage of SMM Tools

Want to frequently engage with your audience and ensure they stay engaged with your brand? How about onboarding a social media management tool?

If you do add one to your strategy, you can:

• Identify the right engagement time and share your posts with your audience for better engagement.
• Track all the comments or new posts that your audience leaves via their accounts using features like social mentions.
• Understand what posts work with your audience and design a post pattern that increases the engagement rate at your profiles.
• In a nutshell, the SMM tool can help you improvise your social media strategy, which enables you to gain better engagement.

Social media management tools such as Statusbrew help you achieve the same results. From bringing all the social conversations to one place to helping users schedule their social posts, it does it all. Statusbrew also helps you track your performance based on post insights and audience demography.

Read More: Top 20 Enterprise Social Media Management Tools

Keep Spam Out of Your Inbox!

Once your brand is big and you start getting more engagement on social channels, there is a chance that your DM or comments section could start getting spammed.

By spam messages, we mean you will receive requests that aren’t relevant to your brand. What’s worse, sometimes these spam messages overshadow the ones you should focus on. This results in you missing out on your customers' needs and hampering their experience with the brand.

That’s why we highly recommend clearing out spam messages so that your team can focus on what’s important - reaching out to customers proactively.

With Statusbrew, you can hide or report spam messages and help your team save time and effort going through them.

Communicate Thoughtfully

Customers also appreciate your brand being thoughtful towards them when stressed about something. Now, your customers don't need to be stressed because of you. They may be having a bad day, and sometimes comforting them would result in improved loyalty.

Source: Freshsparks.com

As you can see, this customer was heartbroken about losing her three hard drives in a week. What’s surprising is that she didn’t even mention BestBuy. But the brand made sure to reach out to her. They consoled her and shared a link to hard disks she could purchase at discounted rates.

Simple gestures such as this leave a great impression on your audience and encourage them to return to your brand.

Set up Internal Best Practices for Responses

Your team must adhere to certain best practices when responding to customers or curious audiences on social media platforms. After all, a single mistake in responding to a question can lead to a bad impression that will be visible to everyone online.

Here are two ways that will help you respond faster to customers on social platforms.
A. Use Saved Replies

Tools like Statusbrew allow you to create saved replies that can be sent to customers asking frequently asked questions in one click.

With saved replies, you can help your support team answer common questions faster. This will help them save time for more pressing questions.
B. Use a Knowledge Base Software

We suggest you create a list of responses that can be utilized for common queries or during situations that don’t require technical expertise.

You can write them in a typical Google Document or opt for the best knowledge base software to store all the responses in one place. It would be better to have an internal wiki instead, as it can be customized and updated as new situations of common queries arise with time. On top of that, it can be used by new joiners as well.

That means you can avoid training new employees as they will have a self-service guide to answer customers on social media platforms.

Maintain a Regular Posting Schedule

You all must have heard this saying, “Out of sight, out of mind.”

If you fail to post regularly on social media platforms, chances are that the next time you do share a post, your audience may not engage with it much.

Be consistent when it comes to posting on your social media channels. Create a calendar, and decide what posts should be shared regularly. At the same time, ensure to track the engagement each post garners for your brand and how many led to queries about your offering.

Tools like Statusbrew allow you to preview all the social media posts as they get scheduled for posting. What’s more, you can also use the calendar view to understand if there are any post overlaps or not. This helps you avoid double work and ensure that only unique content reaches your audience.

Gratitude is the Key

There are many situations where you should show gratitude towards customers or the audience that engages with you on social media platforms. If they share their feedback, let them know it is much appreciated and will be implemented soon. If they have been your early supporters, share your journey with them and how they engaged.

You should also show gratitude towards customers who overcame the bad experience with your brand and still decided to return for your services. Let them know how crucial their engagement efforts with your brand are appreciated. Send them invites to your exclusive sales or a token of thanks in the form of invites to closed events.

Best Examples of Customer Support on Social Platforms

While the steps mentioned above will help you improve your customer experience on social media channels, we decided to share a few more examples to help you in this direction.

1. Adobe

Adobe Customer Care accounts on Twitter are known for being prompt with customer requests. They share prompt updates on how the issue is being resolved with the customer. Moreover, they share realistic timelines on when an issue will be resolved.

As you can see in the image above, Adobe’s customer care team on Twitter took up the customer request on the same day. They even suggested possible solution without hesitating. This not only helped the customer get a solution faster but also left them satisfied.

What do we learn?

Adobe teaches us to be prompt and share accurate updates to help customers learn how close the brand is to resolving their challenges.

2. Spotify

Spotify is known for being empathetic toward its subscribers. They consider all their concerns and challenges to ensure their experience remains seamless with the brand.

As you can see, Spotify ensures its customers aren’t offended by their services. They clearly let their customers know that they too are concerned about the issue and aplogize right away. What’s more, they plan to dig deeper to understand why this problem was caused in the first place.

What do we learn?

Spotify teaches us to be mindful of customers' time with the brand. They make sure that:

• The customer learns that they were updated about this issue post they reached them out
• They respond faster so that they can avoid making the customer angry

3. Domino’s Pizza

Domino’s is known for being witty on social platforms. They use puns and humor to keep their audience engaged with the brand. And the best part is they do it consistently.

Domino’s teaches us that humor can be used to keep the audience engaged with the brand. Moreover, it helps you ease a customer into the conversation. They won’t feel hesitant or think that your brand is unapproachable just because it is famous.

Top 3 Customer Support Tools on Social Media

If you wish to be consistent with your social media channels and ensure they contribute towards building a seamless customer experience, you should try these support tools.

1. Statusbrew

Statusbrew helps you bring all your social media conversations to one place. You can track what’s being said about your brand and organize it in one place. What’s more, it gives you the liberty to comment on incoming posts faster when compared to other SMM tools. It also allows you to track your performance as a brand on different social channels all at once.

2. Document360

Use Document360 to help your social team address their incoming questions about your brand. This knowledge base software allows you to create an internal wiki that can be used to train employees on how to respond to customers and engage audiences on social media platforms. You can create a repository of answers that your team can use to send immediate customer answers. They can even share a simple link to the knowledge base article in the comments to help customers find answers faster.

3. Freshdesk

Freshdesk lets you capture customer queries or challenges from social media platforms and convert them into a ticket. This help desk solution helps your team keep track of all the incoming questions about your product on social channels. What’s more, they can even track if the same customer had any other questions in the past and how their question was resolved by the team earlier.

With the help of these customer support tools, you can create a seamless experience for customers on social media platforms.

In the End - Choosing the Right Solution to Improve Customer Experience on Social Media Matters

Delighting your customers is quite a challenge, especially when it comes to social media platforms. They get to see more options that may offer better services than you. In the end, they may end up leaving your brand for others who’ve successfully offered better services to them.

That’s quite brutal. But you can certainly avoid facing this scenario if you implement the best practices from our detailed guide. It will walk you through tried and tested strategies that help brands improve customer experience on social media channels.

We were also very careful about suggesting the right customer support tools that you can use to enhance customer experience. One of our top picks would be Statusbrew. It works as both social media management solution and a support tool with its abilities like saved replies and performance monitoring abilities.

If you’d like to know more about it, you can schedule a demo call and get to know more about the tool!

Try Statusbrew