Being a customer these days means that you have multiple communication channels to choose from. You are no longer glued to a traditional automated phone system. Nowadays, there are self-service knowledge bases, instant messaging services, and AI-powered chatbots to cater to the needs of different customers.
As a prospering business, you’ve likely worked on social customer service in some form. Social media may be one of the many channels for customer support, but since it’s prompt and accessible, customers will be reaching out to you regardless of having a business plan.
Now the question is: Why should you include social media customer service tools into your business plan? It’s rather simple: People want companies and brands to offer social media customer support services. And keeping customers happy and satisfied is the whole point of offering customer support services.
Social media customer service means leveraging multiple social channels to offer effective customer service and support. Moreover, customers readily reach out to brands on social media for resolving their queries and issues — and get a prompt response.
Social Media — The Most Important Customer Service Tool
If you are a budding business and have not made a social media presence yet, then you need to as soon as possible. But if you are already on a social media platform, then you need to be active and responsive on it so that your business garners more leads and grows its customer base.
Social media is an exceptional customer service tool — in fact, the most powerful customer service tool these days — and here are the reasons:
1. Social Media Brings Your Brand and the Customers Together
It seems like everyone has their focus on their smartphones these days, even when they are at a shopping center or in the middle of a conversation. Social media brings everything at your disposal. Multiple businesses even have 24/7 social media support. Moreover, with the ability to create unique brand pages, you can even run shops and upload menus on Instagram and Facebook.
More than 80% of all internet users are now active on at least one social media platform as it is the key to communicate and interact with customers. Their views, likes, and comments provide you valuable insights and help you strategize your social media objectives better.
However, you need an active presence on all the social media platforms as today’s customers look for prompt responses. For instance, around 72% of customers posting tweets on Twitter expect a valid reply within 2 hours of posting. Hence, it puts a lot of pressure on companies to improve their social media customer service.
2.Social Media Brings forth Your Customers’ Opinions and Feedbacks
Getting valid feedback from a potential customer can be hard. It shouldn’t be, but sometimes it is. Even though you send out surveys and ask for feedback, people don’t always have the time to provide the information you’re looking for. Plus, there are a few times when happy or satisfied customers do not provide relevant feedback and fill out surveys. However, unsatisfied customers do, which makes it even more difficult to figure out what your customers have to say about your service and brand, in general.
Providing feedback on social media is quicker and simpler than filling out a lengthy survey form or answering a questionnaire. Happy and satisfied customers can give feedback willingly — without solicitation.
When you’ve made an active presence on social media, you’ll be able to get a clear insight into what you’re doing right now. Moreover, you will also know exactly what your customer expects from you, so that you make the adjustments accordingly, thereby improving your customers’ satisfaction with your service.
3.Social Media Helps You Provide Quicker Responses to Customers’ Complaints
Customers will use social media to express everything, including their complaints about a particular service, product, and bad experiences with brands. Not only will they post a review about a product or experience to their friends or followers, but they also use social media platforms as a way to connect with companies since social media promises a quicker response time.
As much as you might like never getting negative feedback at all, that’s not the way this works. You can leverage social media and the fact that customers use it as a medium to complain to your advantage. When a potential customer tags you in a post or shoots you a direct message, you can respond to them within a few minutes rather than having an employee sort through a general inbox and use their best prudence to get responses to the right departments.
4. Social Media Lets You Build a Healthy Relationship with Customers
Engagement is a vital aspect of building a successful brand and a customer community, as well as building trust and loyalty between your brand and customers. Getting engagement otherwise can prove to be difficult, though.
Social media helps you increase your engagement with customers almost immediately — you can offer BOGO deals, arrange giveaways, ask questions about your products, feature customer feedback, and much more. The potential of engagement is enormous, and social media lets you keep your customers almost always connected to your brand. Moreover, you can use social media platforms to build transparency in customer relationships by quickly answering questions and queries via Tweets or Facebook.
5. Social Media Gives You More Control over Your Brand Identity and Reputation
People will discuss your brand, whether it be right, wrong, or based on a one-time experience that doesn’t represent your brand accurately. It can be exasperating when you cannot do much about it but hope that nobody sees the unfortunate comments or feedback that your former customers might say about you.
In the case of feedback on a social media platform, you have more control and hold of your brand image than just sitting back and hoping. For example, you can quickly respond to complaints, address problems right away, issue apologies, and can post content that helps put your brand in a positive light. Moreover, social media can also portray the quality of your products and help you better control your brand identity.
Thanks to the rise of social media platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, Facebook, etc., you can easily identify influencers and brand advocates, who can help you increase your consumer by broadcasting information about your brand. Use your social media handles to their full extent, interact with customers, and provide them the best social media customer experience possible.
The Bottom Line
Social media can be leveraged as a marketing tool for modern-day businesses, and it can also enhance a company’s customer service. To benefit from this characteristic, you need to employ it well. If you do not manage your social media presence strategically, it can damage your company’s reputation and drive potential customers far away.
In this case, Simplify360’s Social Media Customer Service Tool will help you manage your social media and digital customer service in a streamlined, careful, time-efficient, and cost-effective way. Moreover, it will allow businesses to handle and respond to all their messaging platforms and review websites. Put simply, investing in powerful social media and digital customer service will provide exceptional outcomes that will benefit your brand in the long run.