Creating a social media customer support strategy
It's important to have a strategy in place to serve customers better on social media. From hiring a dedicated team to segmenting the different social channels, here's what you can do to improve your social media support.
Hire a dedicated social support team
Having a dedicated team handle social media support is an added advantage for companies who have a large customer base, and want to provide a more personalized approach to customer interactions. The social team can deal exclusively with conversations on channels like Twitter and Facebook, and ensure they’re in sync with the required language and tone. This way, all the team members can play to their strengths and work towards the common goal of delivering ‘wow’ customer experiences.
Segment the different social platforms
Different social channels have different etiquette and nuances that support agents should be aware of and able to adapt to. Twitter, for example, does not support tweet responses that are longer than 280 characters. And once a tweet is published, it cannot be edited. LinkedIn, on the other hand, is hardly used for customer support, but provides a good opportunity to respond to influencers and partners, who want to be associated with your brand. With these ground rules in mind, agents can focus on delivering relevant and concise replies according to the medium.
Use a helpdesk to manage social support
By using a ticketing software like Freshdesk, your team can handle social media channels from a unified location. Support queries from Twitter and Facebook are converted into tickets, making it easy for agents to respond to them quickly. Freshdesk even has intelligent AI-powered features that can scan through your Twitter feed and filter queries that need your attention the most.
Set the right expectations
Use Twitter and Facebook’s native customer support features to improve the speed and efficiency of your responses. Twitter lets you greet users with a set of options that they can potentially get help with, every time they enter into a direct message (DM) conversation. This saves time and productivity for agents, and helps them get context of the customer’s problem even before interacting with them.