Second chances don’t exist in social media customer service. For SaaS businesses, these mistakes can be detrimental to the longevity and success of the company.
Consider the following:
- 75% of customers search for services on social media platforms.
- Coming across poor reviews, unanswered inquiries, and a lack of information lowers the likelihood that these individuals will work with your company.
- In turn, these social media customer service mistakes can significantly diminish customer acquisition rates, sales, and revenue for your SaaS business.
This article will cover some top social media customer service mistakes your SaaS business should avoid to build and maintain brand loyalty.
Table Of Contents
- Failing To Monitor Social Media Accounts Regularly
- Ignoring Customer Complaints and Negative Reviews
- Providing Incomplete Information
- Inadequate Personnel Training
- Overlooking Automation
- Lack of Personalization
- Final Thoughts
You can directly jump to a section of your choice or keep scrolling.
Failing To Monitor Social Media Accounts Regularly
Consumers enjoy the accessibility of social media platforms, with 90% stating that it allows them to interact with a company directly. As a result, failing to monitor what your customers are commenting on your social media posts puts your SaaS company at a disadvantage in understanding your consumer’s needs and wants.
For many customers, a business’s social media page is a platform where they express positive and negative experiences with the service. Regularly checking customer feedback on social media enables your business to understand your buyer personas better. In turn, your SaaS business can target its efforts on improving your services according to your users’ expectations.
Similarly, regular monitoring of your SaaS business’s social media channels allows your company to address customer inquiries promptly. In fact, only 9% of users expect a response that takes longer than 24 hours. As a result, delayed response times can result in high churn rates as customers opt for a competitor with quicker replies.
One way to improve social media monitoring is to employ customer service team members remotely and in various time zones. Undoubtedly, your customers are in different time zones. And so should your customer service team. This reduces wait times, improving customer service experiences and customer retention efforts.
You can also use a social media engagement tool like Statusbrew helps you to decrease your response time by consolidating engagement from different social channels in a single dashboard and getting notified as soon as a conversation is received. In fact, it helps you manage hundreds of your customer conversations along with your team without hassle.
Ignoring Customer Complaints & Negative Reviews
Although negative reviews are detrimental to a SaaS company’s branding, they can still serve as a learning experience to improve operations and grow the business. Rather than ignoring customer complaints or negative reviews, address them directly.
For instance, begin by replying to the negative review, apologizing, and opening a line of communication. Typically, you will encourage the customer to reach out via phone or email to mitigate further negative exposure. Next, inquire into your customer’s expectations and how your company or service fell short. Finally, after understanding the customer’s pain points, develop a solution-based approach to addressing their issues. In some cases, you may offer a refund, add-on services, or private consultations.
Understandably, most SaaS businesses would rather keep negative feedback out of the public eye. If this is the case for your business, you can distribute surveys to measure customer satisfaction. Then, based on the feedback, your SaaS business can proactively track customer experience metrics like the Net Promoter Score (NPS) or Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT).
NPS measures overall customer satisfaction with a company, focusing on providing metrics regarding the long-term relationship a customer has with a business. Conversely, CSAT measures the customer’s satisfaction with a particular product or service. To increase your business’s proactivity, you can utilize Typeform and Nicereply to automatically evaluate and score surveys using NST or CSAT.
Understanding where your company’s service fell short can provide the business with valuable insight into opportunities for improvement. In turn, you can demonstrate to your clients your dedication to providing quality service, and improving client relations and retention. In fact, more individuals are willing to purchase a service from a SaaS company after having a positive social media experience with the business. Additionally, customers who had a positive experience with a company were more likely to refer the business to others.
Providing Incomplete Information
Did you know that 59% of customers have gone through several social media and online channels to receive an answer? In the digital age, customers expect quick, accessible, and complete information when they are faced with a problem or have an inquiry. Failing to meet this standard can result in a poor social media customer service experience.
To reduce these negative experiences, add a frequently asked questions (FAQ) section to your SaaS business’s website. Here, you can address common pressing inquiries. Make sure you provide your customers with in-depth information, saving them time and increasing their satisfaction. Also, with the help of your content and marketing teams, add a resources section that includes training videos, in-depth user guides, and blogs. These resources can cover industry-related topics or provide thorough information about your services and tools.
In-depth information should also be provided to prospective consumers. For instance, 52% of individuals learn about a new company through social media. Therefore, failing to provide comprehensive information regarding your service, benefits, pricing, and perks can result in a poor social media customer experience. In turn, this can lead to poor conversion rates and customer acquisition efforts.
Inadequate Personnel Training
While social media platforms are informal, one mistake customer service and success teams make is being unprofessional with customers. In some cases, this may be a result of inadequate training.
85% of customers expect SaaS employees to convey a thorough understanding of the company and its services. As such, customers expect team members to be well-versed in the company’s services and competitive benefits. Therefore, SaaS companies need to properly train their customer-facing team members in customer service techniques, as well as the software the company is offering as a service.
Some best practices include the following:
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Provide training and onboarding for customer-facing employees. This includes techniques and strategies when speaking to clients, especially when handling escalated calls. Additionally, these teams should be trained as experts in the industry and service. This means knowing how the service works, what perks it offers, and the benefits that make it a better alternative than the competition. A great method is hands-on training, where new team members can practice their skills in hypothetical scenarios.
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Offer ongoing mentorship and shadow programs as new employees transition from training to permanent positions.
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Schedule weekly or bi-weekly department meetings to discuss problem areas or difficult scenarios. The department can discuss the incident and collaborate to reach a solution.
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Set objective goals, such as reducing the number of lost customers or increasing the number of answered inquiries.
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Measure the objective goals and provide regular feedback regarding the team member’s performance. If the employee is not meeting the company’s standards, provide them with more training, a mentor, or a performance action plan.
Overlooking Automation
As mentioned previously, the digital age and social media require quick responses, as well as adaptation to customer expectations and technological advances. As a result, many businesses turn to AI technology and automated chatbots to improve their social media customer service efforts. SaaS businesses that make the mistake of overlooking automation risk falling behind.
Consumers prefer self-service and automated responses to their inquiries. One reason customers may prefer self-service automation is that it offers more accessibility and convenience. For instance, automated chatbots can provide customers with quick canned responses and link to your company’s online resource center. Thus, 74% of consumers prefer chatbots over human corporate agents to solve their queries. This saves your clients the time and hassle of waiting on the phone to speak with a customer service agent.
Lack Of Personalization
While automated chatbots can improve your business’s social media customer service efforts, they should not replace the human element. One mistake that is often overlooked in customer service is personalization. While chatbots are great at providing quick responses to common inquiries, they lack the ability to deliver complex or customer-focused assistance.
As such, avoid completely automating your social media customer service experience. Similarly, customer-facing employees should refrain from relying heavily on scripts or canned responses. While pre-written responses can save team members time, scripts can significantly diminish your social media customer service efforts.
This is because customers don’t want to feel like they’re a metric for the company. In fact, around 71% of consumers prefer personalized services, especially customer service.
Instead, make sure to have a customer success team member follow up ASAP with a personalized message that addresses the customer’s concerns. To ensure your customer-facing teams adequately address your customer’s needs, incorporate customer relationship management (CRM) software that tracks all your client’s data on a secure platform. Various team members can access this information to view real-time metrics, such as the customer’s contact information, subscriptions, current services, invoices, and previous interactions with the company.
Team members can also log their previous calls with a particular customer, indicating any concerns the client may have had in the past. All this information is pertinent to providing customers with quality service that addresses their needs.
Final Thoughts
Social media customer service is no longer an option – it is necessary for any business that wants to succeed. Failing to provide your customers with quality, thorough, and quick social media customer service can result in increased churn, lower revenue, and poor reviews.
Failing to meet your customer's expectations on social media can result in higher customer churn, decreased revenue, and negative reviews.
That's where Statusbrew comes in. Statusbrew helps businesses to deliver exceptional customer service on social media by resolving issues promptly and building strong relationships.
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