If you want to keep your customers satisfied, you must use all available tools to answer their questions and provide the help they need.
Traditionally speaking, brands provide customer service through phone lines, emails, and on-site. However, social media platforms turn out to be an excellent digital channel where brands can communicate with customers directly.
With that said, social media customer service works a little differently. Companies use it to provide help, but it also doubles as a marketing channel for attracting new clients.
If you build your social media customer service according to the best practices, you will increase customer satisfaction and lifetime value.
Let’s see how strong social media customer service improves your digital strategy.
Social Media Customer Service in More Detail
Social media customer support is nothing other than using various software solutions to provide support to customers on channels such as Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, etc.
The approach is used by leading companies all over the world because it offers instant, direct communications.
Social media has also become a place where influencers play an essential part. Best Influencer Marketing Companies can help you connect and establish a strong relationship with influencers. In this way, you can use this opportunity to elevate your marketing channels to higher levels.
Social media customer support is on the rise, as more and more customers prefer to get answers through social media channels rather than traditional methods such as phone and email.
Almost everyone has a social media account, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that over 90% of consumers use social media to conduct brand research and communicate directly with brands.
Social media platforms connect customers with your brand, which leads to an increase in spending and better customer retention.
However, apart from providing support, social media channels are an excellent way of increasing brand awareness, and it provides plenty of other opportunities to connect with customers as well.
How Social Media Customer Support Benefits Your Business
Once you’ve got a social media customer support channel set up, you will be able to improve relationships with your customers and get a few other surprising benefits that will help your company in the long run.
Here are some of the benefits you can expect when providing customer support on social media.
1. Improve Your Customer Service Efforts
If you already have a company social media page set up, you can expect your customers to reach out to you and ask for support. Instead of sending them to other channels, you can provide help directly via chat.
Social media customer support makes a lot of sense because it allows customers to find your contact immediately, rather than Google your email, phone number, or finding other means of communication.
Communicating on social media feels familiar since everyone uses the same platforms to stay in touch with friends and family. There are no psychological barriers, and whenever your customers have a question, they can simply ask your support team directly and receive an answer almost immediately.
While social media channels work great as a marketing tool, they also provide an excellent way of providing extra support to loyal customers. So it’s a win-win situation for both parties involved.
2. A Way To Show Your Customers That They Matter
While social media customer support gives you a quicker way to answer more questions, it also puts you in a tough spot in some cases.
Namely, if you start providing support on Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms, you might get so many questions that some of them will simply stay unanswered.
Showing your customers that you listen to their needs and provide answers to their questions in a timely matter can help you grow trust in your brand.
With that said, if you want to keep your customers happy, you have to answer their questions in less than 30 minutes.
Otherwise, you could be facing community backlash on social media channels. The only real way to prevent that from happening is to provide answers to customer inquiries as quickly as possible.
If you simply leave the complaints unresolved, unhappy customers can eat through your brand’s reputation before you can react.
The best approach would be to answer customers’ questions in less than 10 minutes. That might seem impossible, but with the right customer support solution, your live agents will get access to shared inboxes with customers’ queries allowing them to resolve more issues very quickly.
Sure, the process will put your customer support team under more stress, but once you find the best customer support software for your needs, their work will become much more manageable.
3. Communication With A Personal Touch
When most people think about customer support, they imagine reading generic emails and some type of self-service approach. While those methods do offer a certain degree of help, that type of communication feels automated.
However, social media customer support is the complete opposite. All communication is conducted in a conversational tone, making your customers feel safer and more relaxed.
Personalized communication is much more effective than any other method. Small things like addressing the customer by their first name and showing the friendly side of your brand will help you increase customer satisfaction as well as brand awareness.
Communication is also a way to show your customers that you don’t run from responsibility and that you’re ready to go the extra mile to ensure that everyone is happy with your service.
4. Brand Awareness Boost
Social media platforms are used to increase brand awareness all the time. This can be done through the use of paid social media alongside posting regular organic content. For instance, you may consider how to buy TikTok likes as likes can have a significant impact on your entire account, so could significantly help to increase your brand awareness. The goal of the game is to inform as many users as you can about your brand and turn them into loyal customers.
Instagram is the best place to increase brand awareness, as about 60% of users reported that they learned more about a brand or a product on the platform.
As a business, if you create content your audience wants to see, you’ll show them that you’re an industry expert and that they can trust your brand. Social media platforms are the perfect place to display your brand’s unique features and promote products.
Build a story around your brand, pour some life into the content, and your customers will not only learn more about your offers, but they will also share your posts with friends and family members, extending your reach even further.
5. Access to Reviews And a Chance To Respond
Doctor reviews by patients as well as a wide range of other evaluations can help you build a strong brand image more than most people think, and definitely so if the reviews are positive. However, if you run into a few negative reviews, you can turn them to your advantage.
Positive reviews do most of the work themselves, but negative reviews require a different approach. They present the perfect chance to show your customers how much you care about them as a brand.
Respond to the review on time and try to help the unhappy customer resolve the problem publicly.
If you play your cards right, you can turn a negative review into a positive experience.
Of course, things can get even worse if you’re not careful, but the bottom line is, social media platforms give you access to user reviews and a chance to clear your brand’s name.
6. Show Your Brand’s Informal Side
Social media interaction is the same as any other social interaction. Most people use social media to get in touch with friends and family members, and that’s something you have to keep in mind when running a business page.
Social media is a great way of informing your customers about products and offers, but remember that these platforms are not designed for business first. That’s why you should show your goofy side through funny and interesting posts. This approach will show your targeted audience that people are behind the brand.
Something as simple as a picture of a cute pet or an article about how your company helps improve your community will help you go a long way when it comes to building strong relationships with customers.
The key here is to show people that they can relate to your brand.
7. Provide Product and Offer Updates
Whenever you launch a new product, your regular customers will be excited and eager to see what it’s about.
In addition, you can use your social media channels to inform customers about the latest product launches and special offers and even provide them with an exclusive sneak peek before the product is released.
Your customers will feel special as they are among the first people to see what the product is about.
Repeat the same process regularly, and you will be able to build a stronger relationship with loyal customers and increase their lifetime value. It’s small details like these that usually make the most difference.
Conclusion
Whether you like it or not, the entire world is going through a digital transformation that facilitates digital technologies to improve existing processes and operations.
Social media customer support makes a lot of sense in a world where most people use social media in their everyday lives.
Apart from improving communication with customers, social media customer support gives you the chance to get closer to your audience, build trust, and increase your brand’s overall reputation.
Author bio
Travis Dillard is a business consultant and an organizational psychologist based in Arlington, Texas. Passionate about marketing, social networks, and business in general. In his spare time, he writes a lot about new business strategies and digital marketing for DigitalStrategyOne.
