In the previous decade telephone was the quickest form of communication globally. As a reason, the business owners had a customer service team that resolves customer grievances over the call. Many business leaders are implementing or exploring the possibilities of social media in their customer care.
Because; social media is a robust tool to connect with anyone at any time. Nowadays, the internet is the fastest medium of communication for every business, which they are making the most out of. Businesses can make the most out of the real-time feedback mechanism and make strategic changes in their process.
What is social media customer service?
As the name suggests, social media customer service is businesses delivering aftersales support through social media. The marker size of social media customer care is growing because of its innumerous benefits on their business. It is a perfect tool for any organization to provide customer service during presales, sales, and aftersales. Organizations can resolve customer grievances, answer client queries and manage other customer service aspects on social media. The best CRM software will integrate social media tools to manage everything on a single platform.
It should be a primary objective for any organization to have easily accessible and fast customer support. Any organization with such a customer experience will have a positive brand image and a higher customer retention rate. Businesses can have a specialized team to manage their customer service through social media. Or else they can add the responsibility on the customer service teams to manage the social media queries as well.
Businesses need to train their team efficiently to manage social media customer service. It will help the organization to resolve their customer queries in real-time to remain competitive in the market.
What are the best social media customer service practices?
Social media is more than the random pictures and videos which we see online. It is a robust tool for businesses to increase their visibility and address customer grievances. An effective social media customer service strategy will engage the customer in the interaction and yield better results. If your strategy has many loopholes, it will harm your brand reputation. Following are a few best social media customer service practices that will help your business flourish:
Immediate replies:
Any customer wants a quick reply that solves their problem instantly. Many businesses ignore the aftersales part, which is not at all recommended. Because you also might have left many messages that you did not get a reply to. Businesses need to set the best practices to manage their customer service and hire passionate and friendly customer service reps. Set a workflow that ensures that the customer gets a quick response to their customer.
Have transparency in your interaction:
Other than quick replies the customer also is looking forward to having honest and transparent conversations. Giving false promises to the customer will harm your business in many ways by dissatisfying customers. Just imagine, this irate customer leaves an honest review on all your social media platforms.
As a reason, businesses need to have stringent practices implemented to ensure transparency in customer interactions. The customer service rep can set clear expectations with the customer in terms of the turnaround time for the grievance resolution. Setting clear expectations might irate the customer, but at least he will appreciate your honesty. The customer relationship management software will help to track the customer grievances and resolve them before the TAT.
Have a separate approach for each query:
Social media is a public domain that does not mean that you resolve all the queries publicly. Organizations need to train their employees to understand the severity of the concern. Once they evaluate the severity, they can choose whether they want to solve the issue in public or take it privately. Sensitive personal information needs to be shared on a personal chat to avoid a data breach.
Reply to the client everywhere:
Customers today can use multiple platforms, tools, or types to present their queries. The social media customer service teams need to reply to every message, post, comment, or story that is addressed to your business. Customers that do get a reply to their queries or concern; might leave a bad review about your services or products. As a result, you are not only annoying; the existing customer; but also make your brand look bad for new customers. Let that be any comment; you must say thank you or sorry to the customer feedback depending on the situation.
Personalize the interactions:
Already in the world of automation and robots, people don’t want to feel like they are talking to another one; while speaking to your customer service. Personalizing the customer service efforts will make the customer feel appreciated and valued for their business. The best CRM software in India will give you an overview of the customer behavior and purchase history to personalize the services. The social media customer service team needs to put themselves in the customer’s shoes to understand the problem. Once they evaluate the problem, they can empathize with the customer and give them accurate responses to solve their queries.
Conclusion:
Social media is a robust tool for businessmen to open new opportunities for their businesses. Because social media is the biggest influencer of the 21st century; that influences almost everything. Social media customer service is a revolutionary tool to enhance customer interactions and deliver top-notch service. We at Technology Counter simplify technology for small and medium-sized enterprises to make the right decisions for their business.
Punit