How To Use Facebook Messenger For Social Customer Service

Have you been answering your customer concerns on Facebook? How important is offering social customer service for your business?

Facebook is reportedly the number one social channel, so it's likely to be the first on your customer's contact line for both praise and complaints.

Responding to their queries, owning your mistakes, and keeping your customers in the loop helps your brand build trust.

Why Facebook Messenger For Social Customer Service?

Mark Zuckerberg believes Facebook’s future is private messaging.
About 800 million people use Facebook Messenger each month. Messenger is now available for business pages which means Facebook users can message page admins, and admins can quickly reply. Also, admins can respond to any comment on their page, privately or publicly. For privacy, businesses cannot download the email address of fans, nor can they initiate the conversation.

The ability to message directly to your audience is potent, especially since Facebook would rather have users stay on the platform than go to email.

More than 89% of users access Facebook from their phones, checking Facebook 14 times a day. These people use Messenger heavily.

When you start conversations with users, you are creating friendship on that level. That is how you can go from a business relationship to a personal one.

Benefits Of Using Facebook Messenger For Social Customer Service

• Cost: Social customer care is the most cost-effective way to deliver customer service.

• Versatile: Along with text messages, the user can also share images, videos, emojis & other attachements to better explain the issue.

• Easy to use: Your customers are most probably already using messenger which means there's no learning curve involved for the customer.

These benefits can directly relate to the profitability of the brand.

How To Use It?

Enable Messages On Your Page

You can accept and reply to messages only after enabling Messenger on your page.

To turn ON Messenger, go to General Settings -> Messages -> Edit. Select the option 'allow messages' to your page and click Save Changes.

Be sure that you have enabled Messenger so that your audience can contact you.

If you feel that you are getting more messages than you can handle, you may want to consider using the 'Away' or turning off the feature altogether.

Configure Message Settings

There are two settings to adjust: Response Time and Instant Reply. To access them go to Settings -> Messaging.

Display a Response Time

Your average response time appears in the 'About' box on the left side of your page. It shows how long it takes you to reply.

For setting your page's response time, go to Settings -> Messaging -> Automatically Show Your Response Time for Messages, or you can select the other option.

Response time shows up if you answer 90% of your messages and visit your page atleast once a week. You can choose the response time or have Facebook automatically show your average.

If/When your business is closed, set your messaging status as Away, so it doesn't reflect your response time Statistics.

For enabling this feature, go to your page's Messages -> Click Away.

By setting your status to Away, you are letting your audience know you will not be able to respond.

Now your status will say 'Away' rather than Response Time in your page's about section. Your page messages will remain off for 12 hours, but you can turn them back sooner if you want.

Send Instant Reply

You can set an instant reply to the people who are messaging on your page for the very first time.

Please write a message of up to 250 characters, save it and then click Instant replies to enable it.

Compose an initial autoreply to respond to initial messages. However, this autoreply will not be sent if your messaging status is Away.

Best Practices

Respond To Everything

When a user complains about your service or product by commenting on your social page, all eyes are on you. It is up to you how you can swiftly turn negative sentiment into positive. These types of interactions can earn you more loyal customers. If you choose to shy away and not take up such interactions, you may lose out on your current customer base and end up lossing the goodwill. ==Try rule engine ==

72% of customers expect a response within one hour of reaching out to a brand on social media. You should be quick to grasp what the user wants. Use tools that help you to auto-reply as per the query asked by the customer.

Make Your Replies Personalized

While addressing customers, always use their first name. Language should be courteous. Good work goes a long way, and good relationships with the customer makes your brand grow bigger!

Private reply

Sometimes, the customer is irritated, and the harsh responses especially in your comment section (which is public) could result in the fallout of current customers and may even affect the brand in the wrong way. It is best to address such issues personally. Direct converstaions to a private medium as soon as you can.

Customer Relationship Management

CRM helps you to manage your user with ease. It gives a better understanding of their concern. You can even identify typical patterns to win them over.

Using A Managed Service Like Statusbrew

You can implement all these best practices all on the same platform. With Statusbrew, Messages from all social pages are available at the same place, which means you can get all your messages and conversations of the entire social portfolio delivered right into single inbox.

Statusbrew's Engage allows you to create highly functional workflows within your team. Statusbrew has inbuilt functionality that enables efficient and hassle-free collaboration. Statusbrew offers revamped social rule engine that automates the response based on the condition you set. Conversations across all social channels can be accesed from a single dash board.

You can update your conversation basis the condition you set and even deal with spam and trolls. Statusbrew's team engagement reports help you measure the volume of incoming conversations and the team's effort to reply to those conversations in the engage inbox.

To experience the best social media management log in to Statusbrew. Get 7 days free trial.