September 12, 2018
If you want to service your customers, you go where your customers are. These days, they typically aren’t calling your office. 2019 sees approximately 3.02 billion people on social media—so they’ll be seeing you there!
If you’re skipping social media to gauge customer satisfaction, you’re missing a big piece of the puzzle. Great customer service can have a real impact on a brand’s bottom line. Research from the Harvard Business Review found that customers who received a response to their comment on social media were more likely to not only remain a customer, but spend more money with the brand.
It’s not exactly that consumers are needier these days, it’s simply that information travels faster. This inevitably drives competition. A rapid response on social media is now standard procedure. Facebook only assigns the “very responsive” rate to business pages when they answer within 15 minutes. That might not seem like a big deal but having that badge on your page puts you on more newsfeeds. This means greater reach and engagement.
If you can’t be physically present to answer questions at all times (who can?) then perhaps marketing automation is your answer. Forrester Research predicts that integrated AI tools will “help improve sales outcomes and reduce customer-servicing costs.”
Anything from a canned response to chatbots. Utilize technology to greet your customers when they have an initial comment and it will buy you more time to address the issue personally.
Not everyone is vocal about their dissatisfaction. There are some customers that may never say anything. They just stop buying from you. To get the people in the back to speak up, one genius way is to create polls and surveys to prompt responses and feedback.
Of course, these days, nothing is for free. There has to be a means to incentivize people to reply. This can be anything from a discount to a gift card. It not only demonstrates you care what people think, but you value their opinion enough to reward them.
Unlike the Don Draper days, surveying doesn’t have to take months. Creating a poll on Facebook is simple. SurveyMonkey is also a site where you can create surveys and email them to your customer list. The whole idea here is to reach out for the opinions, rather than wait for them.
Customer service on social media extends far beyond satisfaction. It can also produce deeper data-driven insight into a variety of things about your brand. It can reveal things like:
The data isn’t hard to mine, either. It’s all right there in front of you. Using a customer relationship management (CRM) tool can help you stay organized with marketing automation.
The possibilities for servicing customers across social channels are endless. Never before have companies been so closely connected to consumers. The more you are there for customers and seek their input, the more valuable they will feel.
Research from Sprout Social found that simply answering a customer’s question on social media prompts 49% of consumers to purchase. So, it’s really about the human connection and feeling heard. As long as your brand remains authentic and attentive to your audience, customer service on social media should be smooth sailing.
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