The New Era of Customer Service

What is Social Media Customer Service?

What ever happened to walking up to people at a desk, and demanding action be taken because of a wrong-doing? The rise of social media. With 4.76 billion social media users, making up 59% of the wold population, social media is on the upward rise and is not predicted to drop any time soon. However with this, companies and businesses have needed to step up their game on helping customers in order to stay relevant and in the known.

Introducing, social media customer service. This is the concept of using social sites, like Facebook or Tik Tok, to offer support to customers and followers. This means companies can help answer questions or concerns completely virtually.

You might be asking why is this so important and replacing the traditional way of customer service? With 76% of consumers buying from social media posts and 27% of all people being online purchasers this is an on-going and important way for businesses to expand their reach and engagment to customers and followers.

The Good…

… and the Bad

How to Start

With the growing population of social media users, any business who can start up customer service using social media should. It is a versitile and diverse oppurtunity for any company to invest in considering the percentages of people who not only shop using social media, but people who communicate that way. Here are some easy ways to start:

First: Answer some questions regarding on how to respond.

• How many comments sound frustrated, like they were written after having a bad customer experience?
• How many comments are technical or account-specific questions?
• How many comments provide feedback, either positive or negative?
• How many brand mentions would benefit from a response?

Second: Decide the priority of concern.

• Highest Priority
• Technical or account-related questions
• Complaints from unhappy users
• Issues (or outages) that affect many users or raise a potential PR crisis

• Second Priority
• Responding to general mentions of your products or services
• Thanking those who provided positive feedback

Third: Practice responses, some examples below.

• “Thanks for the shout-out! We’re happy to have you in the (Company) family!”
• “Thank you for buying your (product) from us, @name. We look forward to seeing you again soon!”
• “Thank you for bringing this to our attention, @name! Please DM us with more information, so we can square this away.”

With that, some do nots are also important for companies to learn regarding social media customer service.

• Don’t neglect your customers.
• Don’t delete (or hide) comments or posts. The only exception is when comments are clearly spam or in violation of posted community guidelines.
• Don’t be defensive. Remember that the customer, even when angry, reached out to you.
• Don’t reply or respond to every customer in the event of mass issues or outages. When many customers are affected by a single issue, it’s best to provide only public status updates that will reach everyone.

References

Chaffey, Dave. “Global Social Media Statistics Research Summary 2022.” Smart Insights, 1 June 2022, http://www.smartinsights.com/social-media-marketing/social-media-strategy/new-global-social-media-research/#:~:text=More%20than%20half%20of%20the.

Chan, Joei. “Social Customer Service: 5 Brands You Should Learn From.” Mention, 23 Feb. 2017, mention.com/en/blog/social-customer-service/.

“How Many People Use Social Media to Purchase Items – Google Search.” http://Www.google.com, http://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+people+use+social+media+to+purchase+items&oq=&aqs=chrome.14.69i58j69i177j35i39i362i524l13.-1j0j9&client=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8. 

Scorebuddy. “7 Companies Known for Having the Worst Customer Service.” http://Www.scorebuddyqa.com, http://www.scorebuddyqa.com/blog/7-companies-known-for-having-the-worst-customer-service.

“Social Media Customer Service: Tips and Tools to Do It Right.” Social Media Marketing & Management Dashboard, 5 Feb. 2021, blog.hootsuite.com/social-media-customer-service/#:~:text=Social%20media%20customer%20service%20is.