With more than half of the world now on social media, you’ll be leaving too much on the table for your competitors if you’re not actively engaging and supporting your customers on these platforms. But this is not something you approach without a clear strategy.
In today’s post, we discuss a few things that will make your social media customer support rock as well as a few things that could quickly mess things up.
3 Things to do When Developing a Social Media Customer Support Strategy
1. Develop an ideal workflow.
Handling social media seems all too easy until you’re caught in the web of chaos and unproductivity that won’t help you get much done. Before you jump at this, map out a workflow that carefully analyses your goals and objectives.
These include answering questions such as the expected amount of inquiries you expect to take, how you intend to bring your brand identity to your support, who gets the autonomy to answer questions - could be you or a different point person, among other things. You’ll probably want to look at some good project management tools to help you stay organized as well as a few other social media tools to help boost engagement and productivity.
2. Make plans for fast and timely support.
In customer support, time is always of the essence. This is why you need to make plans to ensure your customers get fast and timely responses to inquiries as well as issues resolution.
While more than two-thirds of your customers would expect a response within 24 hours, about 40% would like to see a response within the first 1 hour, according to the 2020 Sprout Social Index™. Understand that when you start to support customers via social media, time is really a luxury you can’t afford to waste so you can meet your audience’s need for speed.
3. Curate a list and determine the most suitable answers to FAQs.
There are probably a few questions that keep recurring from time to time.
It makes sense to compile a list of these, provide the most suitable responses and have them saved for use either as a reference for your customer support team or as a resource for self-service for about 88% of consumers who expect brands to offer self-service options.
3 Things To Avoid When Supporting Customers Via Social Media
Here are three more things you want to avoid to better serve your customers on social media;
1. Improper management of feedback
Social media has become a more hostile environment as of late. So when customers reach out to your brand with claims and issues that are as hostile as they are frustrating, it’s easy to be tempted to roll in the mud as well. But don’t!
Manage every interaction in line with your brand standards and try to calm the waters even in cases where a customer appears too hostile or unreasonable. As a matter of fact, make the customer support issue the key subject of your interactions.
2. Ignoring customer feedback or inquiries
Like the above, it’s easy to want to look the other way when customers confront you with tricky or difficult situations. But ignoring complaints, inquiries, or whatever, will do your brand more harm than good. Try to attend to as many customers as you can. More reason why many brands also have dedicated teams handling their social media support.
3. Overpromising and under-delivering
Because you’re worried about creating a great brand image for the audience to see, it’s easy to get tempted to promise what you apparently aren’t capable of delivering. On the other hand, it helps to underpromise and then surprise your customers by overdelivering. One easy example is promising 24/7 support when you don’t have a chatbot to attend to customers’ issues or a dedicated support agent at a desk all day.
Conclusion
Recent growth in the social media space has made social platforms a necessity for brands looking to engage and support customers in the best ways possible.
And like every key aspect of a customer support strategy, it requires careful planning and execution to achieve significant success. The key issues raised in this post will help you bolster your social media customer support strategy whether you’re just getting started or have been doing things the wrong way.
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If you’re keen on boosting your customer experience with reliable support services, please, contact us today. We’ll be more than happy to help.
