[Part 1] CUSTOMER SERVICE THROUGH SOCIAL MEDIA

A long time ago, well before smartphones or the Internet existed, users relied on word-of-mouth recommendations to make a purchase decision. Did you need a new VCR? You just had to ask a cousin, neighbor or coworker. That's how most decisions were made.

Today, everything has changed. There are countless sources of information that help us make a purchase decision.

We no longer listen only to the opinions of people we know; now tweets, comments and posts from strangers on social media influence our decisions.

MIT researchers even showed that when it rains in New York, fewer people run in Arizona. Why?

Because there are no social media posts from New York athletes to inspire those in Arizona.

What people say about your company on social media is very important, and that is precisely why you need to create a plan to manage comments (whether good or bad). Your social media customer service plan should help you in different ways, such as immediately solving customer problems or complaints, proactively offering assistance to users and delighting them with your service, and building a brand that is recognized for its positive and inspiring actions (and not just for complaints).

Before we start executing an excellent social media customer service plan, I need you to answer these questions:

1. How do you find comments about your company across the different channels?
2. What method do you use to find comments and respond to customers?
3. When you respond, what should you say? What shouldn't you say?
4. How do you measure and analyze this effort?

In the first part of this post, I'll help you answer these questions and put together a plan that covers the basics of social media customer service.

Introductory Guide to Social Media Customer Service

1. How Do You Find Customer Comments About Your Company Across Different Channels?

Conduct an audit.

The first step in planning your social media customer service strategy is to find out exactly where on your social media platforms your customers are talking about you, and in what context.

For example, your customers might post questions and complaints on Twitter but share posts and tag your brand on Instagram. To get this information, you should conduct a full audit of every channel on every platform where your brand appears to analyze how customers get in touch with you.

From there, you can determine your strategy and decide whether you need to hire a social media customer service professional who specializes in monitoring customer communications.

Set up monitoring streams.

Once you've discovered the places where customers contact you on social media, you need to determine how you'll get in touch with them quickly and efficiently in the future.

You can customize streams and lists based on the segments you prefer. These are some of the streams we recommend setting up for social media customer service:

Positive and Negative Comments

Set up monitoring streams that include a mention of your brand and negative or positive words to stay on top of your customers' satisfaction (or dissatisfaction). Put yourself in your customers' shoes and try to guess what they might tweet or post about your brand. Then set up streams such as “Digitalegia + excellent,” “Digitalegia + worst” and “Digitalegia + thanks” (don't forget to create streams with common misspellings of your company name).

Your Customers' Questions

When a user contacts you with a question through a social network, they want to get an answer as soon as possible; that's why you should set up a stream so you can respond to those messages immediately. Most Twitter users expect a response within an hour, and Facebook pages display an eye-catching label at the top of the profile indicating whether the brand responds quickly to direct messages. Set up a stream for messages that contain your brand name and a question mark, and exclude your website URL (in some cases, URLs shared on social media may contain question marks). This way, you'll be able to answer users' questions faster and give them a better customer experience.

Blog Posts

If you regularly share content on your company blog, your followers might discuss that content on social media. This could be the responsibility of the content marketing team or the customer service team, but if your brand tends to get a lot of responses to blog articles, you might want to designate someone in your organization to interact with those comments so the conversation keeps flowing.

Track your mentions, comments and replies.

This is one of the most important parts: setting up a consistent tracking system that ensures exceptional customer service on social media. It's important that the person in charge of social media monitoring knows their responsibilities perfectly, so they can stay up to date with popular industry stories that could affect the way consumers get in touch with you.

Set up an hourly, daily and weekly tracking system for the different streams, pages and inboxes where users connect with your brand, so you can be prepared to respond quickly and solve your valued customers' problems.

2. How to Find Comments and Answer Customer Questions

Build a system to respond quickly to all questions.

Now that you've established a system to locate your customers' questions, comments and complaints on social media, you need to figure out how you're going to act on them. Whether you designate a specific team member to respond to social media messages or divide responsibilities by social network, build a system that suits your team (and that ensures messages are found and answered as soon as possible).

Set up a dedicated channel for technical support.

If you notice that you spend a lot of time answering customer questions and complaints on social media, you might want to create a channel on these platforms dedicated specifically to customer technical support. This could be an excellent way to separate customer service requests from your colleagues' social media marketing efforts (just make sure all your social media profiles tell customers to go to the dedicated support profile if they need help).

If you assign specific members of your team to respond to customer messages, make sure they sign every tweet, post or direct message with their name or initials, since this will help customers if they need follow-up, as well as humanize your brand and encourage more positive interactions.

If you decide to use this strategy, you can also indicate in your bio or in your posts when your customer service agents are available, so customers know at what times they can get in touch with you.

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Source: HubSpot