Social Media Customer Service - How To Do It Right?

Calling customer service departments & staying on endless holds is a thing of the past.

These days, customers are much more vocal & social media is one place where they can voice their complaints & frustrations with your brand publicly.

So if you're a social media manager, run an online store, or you just want to learn how to provide social media customer service, you've landed at the right place.

Since it would be hard to contain all the information in one article, I'll be putting up a series of articles that'll cover everything starting from the beginning.

All the articles will be linked here when they go live.

In this article, you’ll discover:

What Is Social Media Customer Service?
Is Social Media Customer Service That Important?
How Do I Implement A Social Media Customer Service Strategy?
How Do I Measure The ROI For Social Media Customer Service?

I remember the last time I had to reach out to a brand on Facebook when my sneaker order was all messed up.

Fortunately, the brand quickly responded to all my complaints and resolved the problem in a manner that didn't make me jump ship to another brand.

On bringing up this issue with a few friends & co-workers of mine, I discovered the experiences they've had with different brands on social has been less than ideal.

But it should be, right?

Social media customer service means using your social channels, be it Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. to provide effective customer service & support.

Your customers & potential customers should be able to reach out to you on social channels for help & doubts - and get a reply (quickly!!).

Customer service is usually a passive field, where you, as a brand, will only respond when a customer query comes in.

But an effective social media customer service strategy entails a lot more!!

This can include things such as:

Educational/Self-help knowledge center/videos
Consistent Brand Awareness & Engagement before they become your customer
Offering quick & personalized service on a social channel of their preference

The goal here would be not only just listen to complaints but rather to create a unique experience where the customers feel complimented.

At times when customer acquisition costs are so high, customer churn due to lackluster customer service is the last thing you need.

Let's say you own an electronic store & a customer walks in with a faulty piece of tech.

You wouldn't ignore that customer, right?

Now imagine a situation where the same thing happens on a social channel & you end up ignoring the customer.

And, there are hundreds of potential customers witnessing it.

So what are the consequences of poor customer service?

50% of customers say they would boycott a brand due to poor response on social.

And that's not it!

Failing to respond to a customer on social media can give you a 43% decrease in customer advocacy that affects your goodwill & word of mouth marketing.

Criticizing brands who don't actively respond on social is easy, but it's hard to identify the underlying causes.

It's certainly not enough to simply respond with a generic message, and sometimes even an unsatisfactory can have adverse effects on your brand.

So, you have to know how to respond. This brings us to our next part that is forming a social media customer service strategy.

To form an effective social media customer service strategy, you need to first identify why your customer reaches out to you.

Is it because:

They need help with a product or a service
They have had a bad experience with the product
They have a query regarding logistics
Then have a general question about a product

They have a great experience with your brand/product
They have a suggestion or an idea

I recommend creating a document where you jot down common scenarios of why a customer reached out to your brand on social media. Also, note down how you responded to retrospect on it later.

Here are some quick best practices as well that'll help you get started.

Respond To Everything

Every comment, review, post, message, check-in on your social media channels need to be acknowledged.

Avoid letting all these things go unanswered.

There's no doubt your customer wants to be heard; it's that plain & simple. So you'll have to ensure that you don't end up ignoring the customer.

If you're dealing with the same customer queries over and over again on your social, Statusbrew's Saved Replies can reduce your team's response time by saving you from typing out the same answers repeatedly.

Take It Away From The Public's Eye

Often you come across situations where a customer issue cannot be resolved publicly on social media. Also in any instance, if a customer's information is involved, you need to move the conversation to private communication.

The best way to handle such instances is to quickly acknowledge the customer query & then connect with customers on a private channel such a DM (direct message), email or a phone call, etc.

Keep A Track

Customers these days expect a brand to know who they are, what they have, along with insights on previous experiences with the brand.

Keeping track of all the interactions is extremely important, so you'll have to ensure all your systems are linked up.

Using a social media customer service tool can make this painless & help you handle the pressure with ease.

Statusbrew's Engage Inbox makes all your customer interactions seamless, personal and efficient.

All your conversations from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTuber, LinkedIn, GMB are synced & available in a unified inbox.

You can easily reply to all your conversations with your team & even automate it. You past conversation history with any customer is neatly placed and always available via the Contact Sidebar.

To justify the amount of time, resources, staffing & initial investment, you'll need to know how you can measure the ROI for providing social media customer service.

Social engagement reports, leads generated, customer feedback scores are excellent measures of the times & resources spent on developing social media customer service for your business.

If you have a social media customer service team, generating a report that shows how responsive they are along with their performance is another way for calculating success.

Statusbrew's Team Reports allows you to understand how individual users are handling customer queries across the brand.

Try Statusbrew for yourself, or book a free demo with us to understand how Statusbrew can work for your business.

Try For Free!

Wrapping UP

The point of this article is to stress the importance of social media customer service for your brand & how you can lay down the first steps of forming an effective social media strategy.

You need to understand why it's important for your brand to have a strategy in place along with its benefits and consequences.

The role of social media customer service can play a big part in the success of your brand in the long run.

What's Next

Without the right tools at your disposal, executing your social media customer service strategies can be a difficult task.

To help you in your search for the best social media customer service tools, we'll be shortly putting up a list of the best social media customer service tools for businesses of all sizes.

It's now time to start working on your social customer care strategy. If you already have one up and running, let us know what's worked in the comments below.