7 Tips for Excellent Social Customer Service

Social media has become more than just a place to connect and share things with friends and family and follow your favorite celebrities or favorite sports teams. Many consumers have turned to social media platforms as a means for customer service. In fact, about 67 percent of customers are using social media for customer service and 33 percent prefer to contact a brand via social media rather than speaking with brand representatives through the phone.  Contacting brands via social media is a lot easier and faster than trying to reach a representative through the phone.

This means that businesses must adapt to customer wants in order to make them happy. It is no longer enough to just use social media to promote products and services; businesses must now utilize the social media space to engage with customers in a different way to build an even stronger relationship. Only about 62 percent of businesses use social customer service. If your business is on social media, which is most likely the case, you should be taking advantage and provide excellent social customer service. This will only make your customers like your brand even more.   

Here are some important ways to create superb social customer service:

1. Make it Easy for Customers to Talk to You

If the customer cannot reach you, then your social customer service is nonexistent. Make sure your social media accounts allow for customers to send you messages. When customers cannot reach you, you will not know what their problems or concerns are; there might be a big problem and you will not know of it and you can potentially be losing customers this way.

2. Listen to Your Customers

Once your customers are able to reach you, make sure you listen and understand their problem. Often times, brands respond with a standard message that does not help at all; it often times leaves the customer confused or feel irritated because the automated message was of no help. Instead, take the time to resolve their problem.

3. Resolve Their Problem Through Social Media

If your customers contact you via social media, then that means they expect for their problem to be resolved through that social media platform. Don’t send them to your website to read your FAQ’s or have them call elsewhere. Try your best to fix the problem and ask enough questions to be able to resolve it.

4. Personalize Your Responses

When replying to your customers try to make your responses somewhat personal. For example, respond to them using their name and perhaps using a bit of your brand persona into the messages can make quite a difference in customer service.

5. Reply in A Timely Matter

You should be checking your social media accounts often. Customers have access to social media all day long and can contact you at any time of day. So you want to make sure you are replying to them as soon as possible; don’t make them wait hours to get a reply from you. They want to get issues resolved soon.

6. Admit To Any Mistakes

When customers have complaints, its okay to apologize. It is better to respond to their complaints than to just ignore them.  You do not want those complaints to turn into something really negative.

7. Delight Your Customers

Also included in social customer service is responding to happy customers. For example, if they mention your brand on Twitter, and they tweet out that they love one of your products or services, you should reply and thank them or simply reply with a positive message. By doing this, your customers will appreciate your brand even more, therefore creating a better relationship with them.