18 Ways to Win at Social Customer Support
Social customer support is more popular—and more important—than ever. While your organization may have started its social accounts to drive sales, build brand awareness, and connect with potential customers, once you’re on social media, it’s important to help your existing customers when they need it too.
Customers who receive a response on social are more likely to remain a customer1, spend more, and recommend your product or service to others. Plus, Sprout Social found that simply answering a customer’s question on social media prompts 49% of consumers to make a purchase2. Providing social support has a direct impact on your organization’s bottom line. When done well, social customer care will increase sales and customer loyalty, while also making your brand stand out among your competitors.
Keep reading for our top eighteen tips to make sure you’re providing top-notch social media customer support.
Make A Plan
Don’t wing it. Social customer care is its own specific type of support and requires care and attention. Be strategic, make a plan, and put your plan into action. How you provide customer support on social will likely be part of your organization’s larger social plan, including contributions related to branding, marketing, and content. For the support part of social, consider who will provide it, the tools you’ll use, response time goals, voice, and more. The rest of the tips below can help as you create your plan.
Develop Your Social Team
If possible, avoid having a casual arrangement of customer service representative hopping into social media support from other support channels to pitch in occasionally. Instead, create a team just for social support. By having a team of people ready to handle support on social media, you can ensure the proper channels are monitored, schedule coverage, and train agents to be the best at the work.
Respond Quickly
People expect fast replies on social. According to Sprout Social, about half of the survey respondents value a quick response on social media3 above any other action a brand could take. If your team can aim to handle most social queries in under an hour, you’ll be in great shape. In fact, 42% of customers expect a reply within an hour. The faster, the better, as long as quality and accuracy remain high.
Set Expectations
Whatever speed of reply you decide on, it’s essential to be consistent. Avoid answering social queries quickly on most days and then suddenly disappearing for a full day at random. Find the best schedule for your team and based on organizational goals, make sure customers know what to expect. If you’re not going to cover social support 24/7, consider adding when you’ll be around—and where else people can go to get help—to your profile.
Be the Brand
Your social presence is your chance to contribute to how people see your brand for better or worse. Every message you post on a social channel represents your organization in public. Knowing that, everything—from your social media plan, the voice you develop, and beyond—decides how people perceive your organization as a whole. It’s your job to not only provide excellent support, but also show your social media followers why you’re the best option for the product or service you offer.
Choose the Right Channels
If your brand is on a social channel, it’s inevitable that you’ll receive customer questions either in comments or direct messages on that channel. While you may not be ready to offer full support on every social channel, you’ll need to at least keep an eye on them all to avoid missing any issues that could snowball into customer frustration. As you actively provide support on specific social pages, people will take notice and reach out to you there. To figure out which social media accounts to actively include in your support plan, consider going where your customers are. If your customer base tends to love Twitter, you should learn to love it too. Pew Research Center’s Social Media Use in 20184 survey is full of data to help you figure out which platforms to use based on your customer demographics.
Develop Your Voice & Personality
Whether your social team is one person or several, the whole team must know how to communicate in the voice of your brand. Decide on your style—whether more professional or laid-back—and make sure everyone providing social support knows it well. As you’re establishing your voice, a brief document to reference with specific requirements and a few examples can be a big help in making sure everyone’s on the same page.
Train Your Agents
Customer support agents must be accurate, friendly, empathetic, timely, and brief in social support. While some skills can be carried forward from other forms of support, helping customers on social channels requires a few specialized skills too. Make sure any agents providing support over social media can:
- Resolve issues quickly and publicly.
- Communicate in the appropriate length. (Especially key for Twitter!)
- Post error-free messages without needing someone else to proofread.
Know When to Stay Public or Go Private
The public nature of customer support on social media can be both a blessing and a curse. Everyone’s watching, so it’s a must to tread carefully. However, don’t let that convince you to take every social support interaction private. No one wants to see a feed full of messages asking people to email or DM, with no real helpful messages. Do try to handle issues on your feed itself, where anyone can see it—and others may benefit from the answer you provide—and only take account-specific and private details elsewhere.
Choose the Right Words
Being too stuffy won’t feel welcoming, but being too casual when someone is frustrated won’t go over well either. When providing social support, it’s imperative to consider the language you use very carefully. As you’re finding the right tone for a specific message, consider the following:
- Does the customer use emoji, exclamation points, or slang? (You can too!)
- Is the customer angry? (Be empathetic and understanding, and get right to the help.)
- Is the person saying random things that don’t seem to make sense? (Maybe they’re trolling. Be careful.)
- Does the customer’s message look like they may not be fluent in your feed’s official language? (Avoid slang and colloquialisms. Go with smaller words with the clearest meaning you can manage.)
Use a Hashtag
If you’d like to group your support replies and make them more easy for people to find later, use a special hashtag in every response. You may also want to consider creating a unique hashtag to promote your self-service support too. When a new help center article is available or if you’d like to highlight a special feature, add a hashtag to social posts sharing it. Over time you’ll end up with a whole collection of helpful tips your customers can refer to anytime.
Track Metrics
Social customer support is more than just short, quick replies. Tracking metrics to determine your needs and the work your team is doing is essential. At the very least, you’ll need to track the volume of incoming queries to determine staffing. In addition to incoming volume, consider tracking response time (how long it takes you, in hours, to respond to a question) and response rate (the number of incoming messages needing a response that receive one).
Make Things Right
One thing to always keep in mind when providing support on social media is how public it is. If you make a mistake, admit it, apologize, and make it right. There’s no hiding on the social web.
Understand Ways to Diffuse Anger
It’s inevitable that people will be mad and take it out on your social media accounts. Before that happens, think about how you’ll deal with it. Remember to be empathetic and that they’re mad at the product, not you personally. Do your best to solve the problem, but don’t get caught up in a public argument or blame game. While you don’t have to profusely apologize for a problem that isn’t actually your fault, don’t spend time blaming the customer either. Simply find the solution and move forward. By taking care of them, you’ll know not only to solve the problem but also grow their trust.
Prepare for Trolls
It can be hard to tell if someone is trolling or not sometimes. If you see a message that makes you wonder, reply once to genuinely help address the issue. If their reply indicates a lack of seriousness or is a bunch of nonsense, move on and avoid getting dragged into an argument or unproductive conversation. Sometimes people are just bored and are looking to waste your time.
Look for Opportunities to Make Customers Happy
Beyond the expected social support queries, some people will ask questions about your brand or complain about a problem with your product without tagging you in their message. Don’t dive into conversations like these to argue or defend, but do reply if you spot a message with a problem and can genuinely help. By being helpful when the customer doesn’t expect it, you’ll provide a delightful surprise and make a positive impact on how they feel about your brand.
Work Carefully
Accuracy is key. While it’s essential to work quickly in social support, working carefully is a must-do too! With everyone watching, it’s important to get things right. There is basically a 0% chance that someone won’t point it out if you make an error. While the occasional typo isn’t a gigantic problem, inaccurate information about your product does not look good when you’re supposed to be the expert. Incompetence will make people hesitate to spend money on your brand.
Be Present and Build Relationships
Social support is public and visible, so it’s important not to drop in and out at random. Decide on a plan and stick with it. Making adjustments as needs and demands change is fine, but don’t disappear. If you’ve created a social environment that’s conversational, and welcoming, while providing help quickly, suddenly switching to a stuffy tone and much longer response times will negate the good you’ve already done.
Be a Social Support Butterfly
Social media isn’t going anywhere, so as long as your brand exists on the web, your team must be ready to help customers where they are, whether they’re ranting about a recent product change, reviewing their experiences with your brand publicly on their own social feeds, or simply asking a question.
To get started, develop your plan using the tips in this post as a guide. Focus on finding your voice, establishing your goals, and tracking demand. Once you’ve got the basics right, you’ll find it easier to expand your social customer care plan into one that will outshine the competition.
Source:
1 – https://hbr.org/2018/01/how-customer-service-can-turn-angry-customers-into-loyal-ones
2 – https://sproutsocial.com/insights/data/q2-2017/
3 – https://sproutsocial.com/insights/data/q2-2017/
4 – https://www.pewinternet.org/2018/03/01/social-media-use-in-2018/
