daaabil321: Five Social Media Customer Service Tips

Wednesday, November 21, 2012

Five Social Media Customer Service Tips | Business 2 Community

Do you use social media as a way to communicate with customers? Based on our recent customer service survey, 18 percent of respondents use a company?s live chat and 5 percent rely on social networks to resolve a customer service issue or concern. If social networks are not an active part of your customers? experience, you might want to invest the time in building a social media customer service strategy that will ultimately put your customers first.

As more and more customers turn to social media to resolve customer service issues, customer service departments need to ensure they have their tools and resources in order to provide a positive customer experience (CX). As customer relationship management is mostly lead by marketing, sales and customer service teams, it?s especially important for employees in these departments to understand how they can take their client-facing interactions to the next level and enhance their customers? experience through social media.

Five social media tips to ensure your business is leveraging social media to put its customers first are:

Designing a collaborative social strategy that includes a detailed social media 101 plan complete with customer service do?s and don?ts. This plan should be distributed to all employees and helps maintain a consistent brand message from the top down.
Defining a list of social leaders within a company and deputizing them to take point over customer service interactions. By empowering this group with the tools created in the social media plan, your social leaders will have the resources to effectively engage with customers across all company social channels.
Dedicating a team that monitors the company?s social media efforts across the web and mobile platforms to proactively handle customer service needs. Detecting customer service issues early will allow your social leaders to respond quickly and decisively.
Providing a go-to resource or social media help center accessible on the web or even via a mobile application to answer frequently asked questions (FAQs) and make it easier for customers to communicate with your business. A lack of access to quick answers or essential information can be one of the most frustrating aspects of customer experience. The majority of problems can be easily solved by simply creating an FAQ to answer the most common concerns.
Using analytics to track and measure the value of customer engagement and identifying how your business can improve the social media CX. Measurement is the most important element to improve customer interactions and analytics can provide insight into troublesome areas and identify touch points that need to be addressed.

By incorporating these tips within any social media customer service strategy, organizations can ensure they develop a customer experience that is positive and consistent throughout their entire lifecycle. Social media is quickly becoming the easiest way for customers to engage with a business and having a social strategy that puts the customers first can help organizations quickly resolve customer issues, provide transparency and build brand loyalty.

What companies do you think have a good social media customer service presence? Let us know in the comments below!