June 20, 2019
It’s a fact! Studies show that most consumers expect a sharp response from brands on social media, and with an increasingly large number of users turning to social to complain and review, it’s crucial brands get their customer service bang on the money!
On Twitter, the average user won’t wait more than an hour without losing their cool! So, what do you do? Ignore them? Hope they forget and their tweets are buried under all of the positive noise around it? NOPE! Response time and what you say is crucial. Stand out from the crowd, be a bolder brand and give the consumer what they deserve. Here are some top tips for creating a credible customer service strategy on social media.
Response time…
It’s crucial to get back to the customer in a timely fashion and address their concerns in a calm and respectful manner. If it isn’t feasible to manually respond quickly, you can always set up response through bots which answer frequently asked questions. The bot can pick up keywords and will answer questions fairly accurately. If the conversation progresses further, you can always take over. Make sure to keep the bot as ‘human’ as possible, with a friendly and consistent tone. Steer away from being too formal, although consumers may well know it’s a bot, they don’t want to feel like they’re talking to one.
Be friendly, respectful and never ever lose your cool…
No matter how offensive, rude and damn right disrespectful the consumer is, you’ve got to keep your cool and control the conversation. Although negative responses can sometimes generate a ‘buzz’, the majority of spats with brands on social favour consumers and you may end up with an unreal mob clogging up your inbox. If they aren’t happy, ask them why. Keep the conversation open and let them know you’re hearing their concerns and issues.
Create a community…
Bring people together! Build groups that allow consumers to interact and engage. Share opinions, ask questions and stimulate your consumers. Get on the front foot and soon enough you’ll see organic discussions happening which can give you useful insight into your brand, which otherwise would be hard to uncover. Just make sure to apply rules to the community and have moderators on hand to keep things running smoothly!
So there we go, a brief intro into modernising, building and maintaining quality customer service using social media. If you aren’t on board just yet, take a look at some of the bigger brands and see how they’re facing up to challenging queries, poor reviews and crazy conversations. One thing is for sure, if you can stay on top of these three things, you’ll build a more memorable, trustworthy and credible brand.