No matter what your business size or niche is, customer satisfaction is a key to business success. With 4.48 billion social media users who spend a considerable amount of time on social media platforms, providing social customer care is an important element of customer satisfaction that brings your business to the next level.

Everyone uses social media, so it’s no wonder that businesses market their products and services on these channels to reach out to their target audience. At the same time, modern people want to communicate with brands and get their questions answered on social media networks, so the demand for social customer care is constantly growing. 

In this blog post, we’ll tell you the importance of providing social customer care and name the most important social media channels to use for customer service, as well as provide six tips on excellent social customer care to follow.

Why Should Businesses Provide Social Customer Care?

Handling customer service isn’t easy. The more communication channels your company uses, the harder it is for customer service representatives to keep track of all conversations and provide excellent customer service. However, providing social customer care is a must these days for business growth.

Here are three main reasons to provide social customer care:

    • Boost customer satisfaction: During the customer journey, people may have questions about your product or services. Since it’s convenient for people to ask questions on platforms they interact with your brand, it’s more likely that you get customer requests on social media. When you answer customer requests, people feel satisfied and more connected to your company.
    • Increase customer retention: Acquiring new customers is five times more expensive than retaining existing ones. To give your customers a solid reason to deal with your business again, it’s important to pay attention to their needs and wants as it’s one of the most effective customer retention strategies. This means the importance of answering their questions on communication channels they use more often. 
  • Keep up with current customer service trends: The days when customers used phones for customer support are long gone. With the rise of messaging, when people expect companies to send emails or messages as a reply to their requests, social customer care is one of the most important customer service trends. Keeping up with trends means standing ahead of your competitors.

If you are still doubting whether your company should put time and effort into providing social customer care, take a look at the chart below to see that the demand is growing.

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Which Social Media Channels to Use for Social Customer Care?

Businesses should provide social customer care on channels their audience uses more often. 

By having a social media presence on different channels, it’s important to be ready for customer requests on all of these platforms. But if you can’t provide followers with social customer care on all social platforms you use for business promotion, it’s better to keep a focus on the most used and popular ones.

According to the Social Media Marketing Report, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are still the most used social media platforms.

This means you should use these social media channels for social customer care, as your customers are more likely to reach out to your company on these platforms. But don’t forget about safety. Your password must be unique and complex. In this case, using a password generator will be an indispensable help for you.’

Read on below for actionable social customer care tips for Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. 

Tip #1: Tell Followers How to Get in Touch With Your Business

Around 67% of people now seek resolutions for issues on social media networks like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. When people reach out to your business on social media, they want to make sure that their request will be delivered to your customer service team. Thus, it’s important to tell your followers how to get in touch with your business.

The best way to do it is to write about your customer support options In the bio section so that your followers or visitors can find information on how to contact your business with ease.

For example, Made.com has around 1.5M followers on Instagram, so the company encourages customers to contact its customer support via email. Thus, not only does the company write about it in the bio, but it also adds its email address as a contact option:

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However, Made.com provides social customer care on Twitter, and the company has a separate account for customer inquiries:

Tip #2: Reduce Server Response Time

When it takes days or weeks to get a reply from a brand, people lose interest in buying from your business. Moreover, social media response time expectations have grown in the last few years. Today, 39% of social media users expect to get a reply within one hour.

To please customers who want to share their customer service issues on social media, it’s important to reduce server response time. The best (and easiest) way to do it is to create a FAQ video and upload it to your business profile, as people can find answers to their questions without reaching out to a customer service representative.

With the rise of video content, when 69% of people prefer to watch a video to learn about a product or service, how-to videos help customers find answers to their questions and make the resolution process faster and more cost-efficient.

Luckily, every business owner or marketer can create professional-quality videos without specialized expertise, as the current market offers several highly intuitive video editing apps. For example, you can rely on Videoleap (available for iOS & Android) when creating FAQ videos or other support content, as it allows you to mix videos and images, add sound effects, use unique filters and stickers, all on the go.

The company’s own how-to videos are great examples of effective support content. These clips make it easy for viewers to understand more about how to make the most of Videoleap – without needing to contact the support team at all. Take a look here:

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What is more, social media platforms roll out business-specific features that help businesses communicate with customers fast. Having a Facebook presence, you can install a messenger chatbot based on the knowledge base to help customers get answers to frequently asked questions or even more. Check out how Air France did it:

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But if you use Instagram or Twitter for social customer care, where you can’t install business chatbots, you can still make the most out of the quick reply feature that allows your business to create a list of replies to frequently asked questions and therefore send them quickly without typing the same replies to different customers. Here’s how this feature looks like in action:

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Another good way to speed up your response time is to encourage social media followers to call you and install IVR so that callers can interact with your customer support team through a series of automated menus ​​and get their questions answered without reaching out to a human. This is a solid option if you have a small team or are experiencing high call volumes. 

Tip #3: Dedicate a Separate Social Media Profile to Customer Inquiries 

Providing followers with excellent social customer care means dealing with their inquiries fast. With a strong social media team, you should have customer service reps who can collect and manage customer inquiries on social media. 

Case in point:

If you sell items on social media and get hundreds of product requests on your main profile, it can be daunting to keep track of all customer inquiries and manage them fast. To help your customer support team deal with customer requests, it’s important to create a separate social media profile for customer care, just like in the example below from Yahoo!:

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Tip #4: Keep Track of All Conversations about Your Business

When people ask questions about your product or share their customer experience on social media, they use different communication options. Some people leave comments under social media posts or slide into direct messages while others tell about their experience on their personal profiles tagging your brand profile.

Simply put, people start a conversation with your brand without asking about your communication channel preferences. To provide good social customer care and show that you care about your customers, it’s important to keep track of all conversations about your business and monitor brand mentions, direct messages, and comments.

If your customers tag your profile, you get a notification that allows your customer support team to manage customer service inquiries quickly. Here’s how it looks like in action:

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But if you want to manage all conversations from one place, it’s a good idea to find a tool with a social inbox feature that helps your customer support team members collect inquiries and redirect them to the right staff across multiple social media channels.

Tip #5: Use Private Channels for Critical Support Conversations

It’s harsh but true: people are more likely to share their negative customer experiences on social media to help other potential customers make the right choice.

Living in the era of social media, when most people read online reviews before choosing a business, negative reviews have a devastating effect on your brand as they convince people to avoid a business. This means the importance of dealing with critical support conversations. 

What is more, it’s a good idea to use private channels for dissatisfied customers to help them avoid cyber criminal attacks when sharing personal data and prevent your brand from negative word of mouth. 

To move critical support conversations to a private channel, learn from Whoop:

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Tip #6: Provide Proactive Customer Care 

Great social customer care should be proactive. This means you can identify and resolve customer issues before they become problems. Communication with your followers and customers on social media is a proven way to provide proactive customer care. Moreover, there are many ways to encourage proactive customer care.

For example, you can tell your subscribers about a customer satisfaction survey. To encourage more people to fill it out, you can also give all participants a chance to win something valuable, just like in the example below:

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Another great way to understand your customers and their pain points, you can use business-specific features like the poll sticker to collect their questions and reply to them before customers reach out to your customer support team. Check out how M&M’s uses this tactic:

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In a Word

In the last decade, the demand for social customer care has grown. Since people spend a lot of time on social media channels, it’s no wonder that they use these platforms as communication channels for solving customer inquiries. What is more, people have high demands, which means brands should be ready to provide outstanding social customer care to stand out from the crowd and keep their target audience satisfied.

Author Bio

Val Razo is a freelance SMM consultant who helps small and medium businesses promote their products and services online.