Social Media Customer Service: Best Practices & Modern Strategies

Before the internet, a telephone call was the fastest and most effective method customers used to seek help from companies.

Telephone calls had already beaten the postal service as the quickest customer service channel.

They called it snail mail for a reason, after all.

Then came email, and the internet became the new home for rapid customer service.

You could say that email killed the telephone call… but then social media killed email.

Once we got used to email, social media interactions changed the game.

With social media, you can connect in real time, up to the second, with anyone. That’s the new wave in forward thinking customer service!

Social media customer service takes advantage of the instant feedback mechanisms and support for photos, videos or other media in established social media platforms.

Moreover, social media is a familiar environment that customers frequently use for many other activities, including interactions with brands they love.

Therefore, it only makes sense that they find it a valuable platform to raise their issues to be resolved by companies.

These stats show why social media customer care is so critical:

• 1 in 3 social media users would rather have social media customer care services than telephone or email.
• 75% of people will likely post something positive about your brand if you make meaningful social media connections.
• If you give a positive social media customer service experience, 71% of your consumers will likely recommend your brand to others.
• Customers will spend 20-40% more if you engage and respond to them through social media.
• About 67% of consumers are seeking resolutions for issues through Twitter, Facebook and other social media networks.

What is Social Media Customer Service?

Social media customer service is an organized system of providing customer support through social media platforms.

It’s a critical and rapidly growing contact channel within the entire customer service ecosystem, complementing call-based customer service.

It covers support services before, during and after purchase.

It also involves activities like addressing complaints, providing guidance, answering questions, or issuing refunds.

Ultimately, the primary goal is to give clients an easy and enjoyable customer experience, which helps retain and grow your business.

Social customer service may be handled by a dedicated social media support team or by the call center team.

For effective social customer service, companies utilize specialized training, workflows and software to resolve customer issues.

Major social media platforms also facilitate such customer service operations.

Since it’s a preferred mode for issue resolution by many customers, effective customer service will meet your customers’ needs and even give your company a competitive edge.

However, you need to manage the unique complexities of this support channel including regulatory concerns about sharing private information, preserving your brand image in public engagement and achieving optimum response rates.

Creating Your Social Customer Service Strategy

You need an overall social customer service strategy before you incorporate social channels into your existing customer service operations.

Considering that 63% of successful companies align all their business units to the overall corporate strategy, that’s the only way to ensure effective and efficient implementation.

A comprehensive social media strategy should feature these 6 key components for customer service:

1. Set up brand monitoring.

The first step is setting up an active brand monitoring system within the social media platforms your customers use to reach out to you.

You can do this conveniently using social media tools.

Customize the brand monitoring tools with streams to identify and list posts and comments with specific words.

This helps you quickly narrow down to the most relevant content.

For instance, you can set up a stream for any mention of your brand with positive or negative words.

To pick out questions, set up a stream for content with your brand name and a question mark.

Having various streams helps you segment customer concerns so you can prioritize urgent issues.

Real-life example

Use tools to help monitor

I use a service called Gorgias which allows me to monitor and respond to messages on all social media platforms including email on a single interface.

In addition, all order information can be found on the same screen, so I don’t have to pull up my shopping cart.

– Steve Chou, Founder, MyWifeQuitHerJob

2. Determine what types of comments get responses.

Obviously, you won’t respond only to positive comments while disregarding negative ones.

Sometimes the way you manage a negative comment can actually win over new customers.

However, since social media isn’t really a dedicated customer support platform, you’ll get many more comments beyond what your customer support team should handle.

Ideally, you want to avoid your social support team getting dragged into conversations unrelated to your business, but still maintain reasonable engagement with your customers.

Above all, avoid feeding the trolls.

To manage this, create a priority list so your team can give extra attention to the most urgent and critical issues.

Train all team members on how to handle both positive and negative comments and give clear guidelines on what to say when they do respond.

Real-life example

Cultivate a Community

The need for social media customer service can be mitigated by customer Q&A on your website.

That said, engagement of any kind on social media can help take the temperature of brand sentiment, find and cultivate potential brand ambassadors and remedy disenchanted customers before they create a ‘social problem.’

– Gene Ferriter, Solution Specialist, Plumtree Group

3. Build a system to get questions answered quickly.

With how fast the internet is, a late answer can be as bad as no answer at all.

Your goal should be to get questions answered as soon as customers ask them.

This requires a carefully organized system with dedicated social customer care members.

Segment responsibilities across different social networks and ensure there’s a clear process for how every issue is investigated and replied to.

Set up a system that unifies all customer issues in one place and assigns specific messages to particular team members.

This enhances the efficiency and speed of resolving customer issues, unlike having to manage multiple social media platforms.

Real-life example

Develop an FAQ

It can get pretty easy to get overwhelmed when it comes to replying to customers on social media.

The number one tip I have is to develop an FAQ, whether that exists on your website or in your notes folder on your desktop.

Being able to have canned responses that you can point to or copy and paste will help manage the work you have to do when replying, and also show that you’ve put some thought into these frequently asked questions.

Additionally, using their name goes a long way, too.

I always feel better served when someone takes the time to respond and simply uses my name in the response. It shows they’re taking the time to at least read my name and acknowledge I’m a human!

– Shayda Torabi, Owner, WithShayda, Co-Founder, restartcbd

4. Consider having a dedicated support channel.

Apart from having a dedicated social customer support team, you can have a dedicated customer support channel within the social media platforms.

In your social media accounts, direct customers who need assistance to your support profile.

This will reduce the challenge of tracking specific customer queries and also provide a reference platform where customers can evaluate past queries similar to theirs.

Most of all, a separate support channel will help segment your social media content marketing efforts and customer services.

Real-life example

Your brand needs to be a social guru (and so do you!)

Be a social guru. Make sure your brand is set up and using the following: Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

If you have a social strategy and are implementing it, kudos to you, but if you don’t, at the very least you can use these social channels to give updates and superb customer service.

Chatbots are the future.

If you’re not using them, you should. Through Facebook and Twitter, you can set up auto-responses that will give your customer an immediate answer.

In most cases, chatbots can answer their question, so the customer can move on to purchasing the product.

The best part is you don’t have to do anything but set them up and let them run.

If you’re a service provider, we also recommend using Twitter and Facebook as your notification system.

If you have a new release, an outage or a new how-to tutorial, there is no faster or quicker way for your customer to gain this knowledge then through a tweet or a posting.

– Elyse Smith, Project Manager, DigitlHaus Agency

5. Have internal best practices for responses.

Customer support isn’t just about solving customer issues.

It’s a key tool in building your brand image.

To achieve this, you need internal best practices that ensure your support team delights customers beyond solving their problems.

Best practices ensure your customer service appears not only professional but also friendly and approachable.

Above all, your responses will be consistent regardless of the type of client you’re dealing with.

Clear guidelines prevent intentional or accidental bias in your teams’ responses, which can give your company a bad impression.

Real-life example

Involve the entire organization.

I would recommend involving all of your employees in improving customer engagement and service via your social media channels.

Instead of having just one or two people responsible for handling your social media channels, why not use the entire workforce?

Develop a culture where employees act as brand advocates and respond to or comment on posts/queries related to your brand.

You can even ask some of your employees to handle your social media platforms on a rotational basis.

This will not only improve customer service, but will also help with employee engagement.

– Shane Barker, Digital Strategist, Shane Barker Consulting

6. Determine how you will measure and report on your efforts.

Reporting and measuring your social customer service activities are essential to gauging your performance.

Identify and measure Key Performance Indicators (KPI) like first contact resolution, resolved issues, response rate, complaint escalation rate, and customer retention.

Also, record qualitative feedback in a document format that’s convenient to analyze.

Customer satisfaction surveys will also help you to gauge your customer service performance.

The data you collect and findings you make can direct your efforts in specific areas that need greater attention. Perhaps, you might find that you need more staff at particular times compared to others, based on the flow of customer queries.

Real-life example

Focus on Lifetime Value

Communication. It’s what marketing is all about, and a negative experience can explode on social media.

Respond quickly, with empathy, and with the aim of resolving the issue.

If brands have a community on social media then the users and customers will want to return and buy again, otherwise why are they following the brand on social?

Therefore think LTV and know that by keeping social media followers happy, merchants can increase their customers’ LTV.

– Luigi Moccia, Founder, Calashock