“Excellent customer service is the number one job in any company. It is the personality of the company and the reason customers come back. Without customers, there is no company.” – Connie Elder
Social media has evolved into a whole new world in itself. It has a huge fan following among generations X, Y, and Z. For businesses, the entire customer pool is available through social media.
In fact, most consumers base their buying decisions on product promotions, reviews, and demonstrations available on social media in this social media-driven world. According to a report by UPS, Generation Y or millennials, some of the largest consumers in the world, consider social media a part of their shopping experience.
Having said that, social media has become a gateway for businesses to captivate the hearts of consumers and drive them to respond to the call of action. Social media affects home insurance, financial choices, and even mental health. However, it requires a lot more effort than just creating a business account on social media to deliver an excellent customer experience.
Creating an audience persona, producing quality content, and rendering outstanding social customer service are some essential elements of a winning social media strategy. In this blog, we’ll focus on social customer service. We’ll explore what exactly it means and some tactics to render impeccable social customer service.
What is social customer service?
Social customer service, as the name suggests, is the practice of using social media platforms and tools to address customer needs, queries, and issues. If you observe closely, you’ll realize that social customer service is similar to auto insurance.
Wondering how? Just like SR22 insurance covers you against an unforeseen loss, reckless driving, or damage that may occur to your vehicle, social customer service, in a way, also covers you against unforeseen damages that may occur to your customer bank and your brand’s reputation.
Social media is the platform where your customers are widely available and through which they can contact you easily and immediately if they have some issues with your products. Imagine what would happen if your customers received a faulty product and they could not complain to you because of the lengthy and time-consuming process.
Won’t you lose your precious customers forever? And the negative word of mouth that’ll spread will cause massive damage to your brand reputation.
However, with the availability of social customer service, your customers can approach you instantly, and you can take actionable steps to address their issues promptly and prevent defaming.
Moreover, with the appropriate, instant, and cordial response, you can calm your anguished customers and again win their hearts by addressing their problems to the core. So, in a way, social customer service covers your customer bank against unforeseen damages and allows you to make the necessary repairs and initiate healing.
Now, let’s discuss some tips for offering impeccable social customer service.
5 Astounding Tactics to Offer Flawless Social Customer Service:
1. Add Value to Your Social Customer Service Programs
The key to running a successful social customer service program is to step into your customers’ shoes and see what’s valuable to them. That’s exactly the point that you need to understand. You have to deliver value to your customers.
Understand their expectations and deliver accordingly. Analyze what type of services they want. Prepare your team with respect to that. Additionally, you should also equip your team to monitor customer behavior, queries, and needs and modify their services accordingly. That’s how you can pave your way to your customers’ hearts and captivate them.
2. Train Your Customer Service Agents to Use the Right Tone of Voice
When we interact with others, two things matter even more than our words. These are body language and tone of voice. If your tone of voice is rude, even if you speak gentle words, the receiver will consider your message to be rude. The same goes with body language.
When rendering social care, your customers might not be able to see the body language of your customer service agents, but their tone of voice will matter. So, you must train your customer service agents to use the right tone of voice. Their tone will largely determine your brand’s personality, as seen from the customers’ viewpoint.
Having said that, you should offer proper training to your customer service representatives. You should also focus on employee engagement, happiness, and morale since happy and engaged employees make engaged customers.
Additionally, you can also hire mystery shoppers to check the quality of the customer service that your representatives offer. But, remember that the purpose behind the audit should be improvising your existing representative’s skills and not firing them if you find some issues. At least, they deserve a chance to improve.
3. Publish Expected Response Windows
Today, everyone is busy. No one likes to wait, and if you want to keep your customers happy and satisfied, beware of making them wait for a response. Does that mean that you have to answer every query instantly? Ideally, that’s how it should be, but it’s not easy to accomplish in practical terms. You may require some time to offer high-quality social care to all your clients.
Also, your customer service representatives may not be available all the time. Then, what to do?
The answer is to publish the expected response windows. For example, if you aspire to reply to all comments within 20 minutes, you can publish that all comments will get a response within 45 minutes. This way, you’ll keep room for discrepancies and make a reasonable promise.
Additionally, when your customers receive a response earlier than the expected time, they’ll feel delighted. Their delight will reward you in terms of positive word of mouth, increased loyalty, and more engagement.
4. Monitor Customer Interactions, Feedback and Identify the Scope for Improvement
The best way to learn about your mistakes and improve your services is to monitor customer interactions and feedback. Through this, you can identify the scope for improvement and modify your services accordingly. Dig into everything. See if your employees are delivering adequate responses, and identify the additional things your customers need and where you stand as compared to their expectations.
Share all the insights with your customer service representatives. Don’t just let them know where they lacked; also, tell them where they excelled. That’s the best way to guide your team on the path of betterment.
5. Educate Your Customers to Make Them Self-Reliant
Customer service isn’t limited to solving customer issues and queries; it is also about educating them to make the most of your products and services. You can take a huge leap on the path of captivating your customers by providing educational content.
Analyze the queries that your customers ask the most and weave educational blogs or create educational videos centered around them. Along with this, you should also create how-to videos, tutorials, blogs, and social media posts to let your customers know about the intricacies of using your products. This will reduce the number of queries that come in and make your customers feel valued.
Today, social media has emerged as the most impactful platform when it comes to rendering customer service. Social media fascinates people of all age groups and is largely used by them. Modern customers use social media platforms to interact with different brands.
This makes it imperative for you to render impeccable social customer service. Social care is the process of rendering appropriate assistance to your customers on social media platforms to resolve their queries and issues. The best customer service companies shape cordial bonds with customers, improve brand reputation, and enhance customer loyalty.
