Using customer service via social media

Is your company already on social media? Then there is a good chance your customers see this as an opportunity to ask their questions or voice their dissatisfaction through these channels. It is important that you prepare well for this, in order to avoid social media blunders.

A mistake is easily made. Unfortunately most mistakes do not go unnoticed. And that can cause reputational damage and cost customers. The dividing line between a funny, witty response and a misplaced insult is wafer-thin. That became clear recently when a customer service agent at Hornbach made a joke.

Ouch. With this response Hornbach missed the mark completely with many followers. In a response to RTL Nieuws, press officer Tom Lebrechthausen admitted that the company had gone too far. "An enormously instructive moment for the webcare team. We are a company where masculinity comes first. We are tough, self-aware, but we must never insult anyone”, said Lebrechthausen.

Those who prepare well can gain a lot from a customer service on social media. A study by the Aberdeen Group shows that companies offering this achieve an annual financial gain of 7.5 percent and a rise of 5.4 percent in social buzz. High time to start with this! Below we give you five pieces of advice for doing it well.

1. Always respond

Not responding to a complaint or question is at least as bad as a badly placed joke. By not responding you unconsciously say that you do not care about your customer's opinion. That is a shame, because this is precisely the opportunity to turn the negative experience into a positive one. Statistics from Amex's Global Customer Service Barometer show that 46% of customers share their positive experiences with others. Our first piece of advice is therefore: always respond to every message. Let customers know that you hear them and refer them to extra information where possible.

2. Know what is going on

To be able to respond to every message, it is important that your customer service knows what is being said about the company. You are lucky if you are tagged in every message. Then you receive a notification and can give a response straight away. It is a good deal harder to respond to a message if you do not see it. We therefore advise you to set up Google Alerts. Here you can enter search terms you want to be informed about as soon as something is written about them. Thanks to these alerts you also know exactly which social media channels your customers are on and you can add extra channels to your customer service if you notice that a lot is happening there.

3. Create special accounts for customer service

If as a company you are very active on your social media channels, it can be good to separate the customer questions and complaints from the normal posts, by creating a separate account for customer service. Nike, for example, has @Nike and @NikeSupport on Twitter. If you choose this, we advise you to add the customer service account details to the bios of the company pages. That way your customers know straight away where they can turn with their questions.

4. Respond quickly and consistently

It is not only important that you respond to every message, but also that you do this quickly. Research by Twitter has shown that Twitter users expect companies to respond to their message within an hour. You of course do not want every answer to have to go past the PR department first for approval. We therefore advise you to draw up a list of standard answers to common questions that have been approved by PR.

5. Keep it manageable

But even with a standard answer list it remains hard to respond quickly to all those incoming customer questions. Because unlike customer service, your customers are not only online during office hours. They also expect a response in the evening and at night. How do you keep this under control?

You can of course move part of your customer service abroad, so that there are staff available at night too to answer questions. But then it quickly becomes very costly and you are dealing with a language barrier. The way to offer your customers 24-hour customer service on social media is with the help of a chatbot. A chatbot is not only available day and night, it can also answer endlessly many questions at the same time. That way customers never have to wait for a response again.

The same standard answers you give your staff, you teach to the chatbot. That way it can answer every question in a representative way. You can of course continuously add new answers, so that it gets ever smarter. Do you not want to switch fully to a chatbot straight away? Then you can also choose to bring the chatbot in only at times when customer service is absent.

Not responding to a customer question or complaint on social media is like not answering the phone in a call centre. Not good, then. If you do respond, you can not only turn a negative experience into a positive one, but also increase your customers' loyalty and keep surprising them.

Want to know more?

Would you like to get started with customer service via social media and help your customers via Twitter and Facebook Messenger, for example? Try it yourself and create a free account!