The Art of Using Social Media as a Customer Service Platform and Enhancing Business Operations

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Social media customer service refers to the implementation of social channels for providing effective and seamless customer support and service. Customers always want to connect with brands on social media platforms for instant assistance and elicit a prompt reply.

Brands are incorporating social media customer support services into their business strategies because customers want them to provide social customer assistance. Gratifying your customers is the crux of customer service.

Every month, over 160 million users message brands and marketers via Instagram Direct. 77% of people doing it seek customer support or service. 65% of global shoppers message a business in their holiday season.
62% of users prefer messaging to calling a business. People under 25 prefer social media customer support channels for interacting with their brands. 35% of this population confirm that it’s their top priority.

Although customers expect a fast response, they don’t always get it. 85% of users expect businesses to respond to their complaint or question on a social media channel within one day.

More than half of users expect their response within 60 minutes. However, 46% brands take more than 4-5 days to respond to these messages through IG or Facebook pages.
Concisely, social customer support enhanced customer loyalty and confidence.

Customer service culture

Tailoring a social media plan to your customer service strategy can give you an opportunity to engage with consumers/followers at another level. It makes them feel part of your journey, story and business efforts, propelling them to recommend or refer your product to others.

To begin with, you must modify or amend your corporate mode of thinking. Brands mustn’t confine customer service to instantaetous patching of loopholes and resolving new issues.
You should rather reach out to new customers and anticipate their demands or new needs before your target audience is actually aware of what they want. That’s called knowing the pulse of the market.
Activating internal channels of communication is a crucial element to integrate your brand with a flamboyant social media customer service.
The more complex is your company’s structure, the more daunting it is for your staff to fathom their tasks and roles, and their impact on business operations and the consumer.
Brands need to create open communication channels between people in their group, encouraging them to better understand their role in the company and perform their tasks. For any brand, it’s an imperative to build employee trust and value.
Doing business and conducting customer-centric communications necessitate a brand to have full faith in its staff.
If you’re sure that an employee can represent your product/service and provide competent, customer-specific service, you need to place full trust on that employee. That’s how companies script successful management stories.

On the interrelation

Social media has long strived to attain a two-way social connection or conversation. We are seeing how brands are leveraging social media platforms to boost brand awareness, listen to their consumers, and market their products or services.

Of course, there are sites like for drawing more traffic to your account and generating engagement, but with streamlined customer support, you can sustain those followers.

The best practice would be to reply as soon as possible. It includes responding to complaints, reviews, and general inquiries. Bear in mind that poor customer experience leads to loss in business in the long run. Prominent brands and influencers on Instagram are using FB for customer service.
Your Facebook page clearly displays your brand’s support response frequency. The platform only considers your brand as very responsive or quick when you reply within 5 minutes or even less than that.

With the integration of programmable, cutting-edge, messenger bots, the game is changing rapidly. Brands can customize away messages for long hours to provide effective and quick options to customers.

The best practices

The size of your business and industry will impact your social metrics. Some brands can underline immense noise or clutter on social media. The challenge for them is to cut through the noise and obtain priority information and contacts.

It’s important to track volume and manage it. It’s not mandatory to transform every mention into an index or ticket because your brand’s social media pages entail heavy, intermittent traffic throughout the day.
The logic is simple. Every interaction doesn’t necessitate a response. A multi-channel, customer support platform must have proper integration to check the customer’s purchasing history and social media backdrop.

If you have already stored relevant and sufficient data, artificial agents can obliterate repetitive questions. Your response speed is critical in social media. You cannot treat these tickets at part with the standard ones because customer expect a much faster response from brands, especially the ones they like.

You need to define your priority criteria through direct account or technical questions, complaints from miffed users, urgent product or service requests, and issues that affect multiple users or effectuate a potential image/PR crisis.
Smaller brands without the scope or need of customer service tools might build one specifically for creating ticket for social media and managing the same. It goes beyond traditional chat support, email, and phone.

The essential tools

The available customer service tools vary on your company’s size and scale. A bakery or home décor with a single-location operation might integrate low-cost resources or free tools. A big brand or multi-national company would invest hugely on software and a dedicated team.

To begin with, brands need to do self-auditing and check the number incoming messages that are actually compliant with customer care.
It’s important to know volume as it helps determine the strength and viability of your tool.
Message management is extremely crucial. You can use the native FB messenger app or Twitter app.
Many brands also communicate through Instagram messaging. You need to track your incoming messages to ensure a timely response.
FB’s single inbox includes FB, Messenger and Instagram comments under one roof. A free chatbot is another good option for FB Messenger.

For larger brands, it’s necessary to build an internal monitoring system. Customer support needs to be a feedback loop to improve products and processes.

Tags: Customer Support