Social customer service is an essential tool for building customer experience, driving loyalty, enhancing brand reputation, and lowering operational expenses by reducing the volume of customer service calls. However, to successfully serve your customers through social customer service, you need to provide quick responses and resolutions.
Exposed to the gold standard of customer service, consumers today expect answers to their questions and resolutions to their issues, and they want them now. They do not have time to wait a day for a response to an email or to wait in an IVR queue to speak with a representative. In such situations, social customer support can come to the company’s rescue. When executed well, the personal, knowledgeable, and helpful nature of social customer service can resolve customer issues promptly, improve the customer experience, and boost brand reputation.
But the question is: how can a brand with limited resources, small teams, and isolated departments (CRM, help desk, customer support, and social) deliver faster, more effective customer care interactions via social media?
Tips for Improving Social Customer Service Response Time
1. Show the Human Face of Your Company
Your customers prefer interacting with other people, not automated systems. Social customer care agents can quickly connect with consumers on a personal level by empathizing with their issues. This creates an opportunity to diagnose the issue further, leading to a quicker resolution. This also improves your brand perception.
2. Acknowledge Pronto
It is possible that a social customer care agent may not have all the answers or that resolving the issue requires the customer to be redirected to another department or channel (due to personally identifiable information requirements or other sensitive information). The agent must inform the customer that they are on the case and that the brand cares about its customers. Customers today are willing to wait a little if the company acknowledges their requests or issues.
If an issue cannot be resolved immediately, agents should provide the customer with a timeframe and adhere to it. A minor delay here and there is acceptable, but do not go a whole day past the response deadline. This way, your company can lose its precious goodwill.
3. Don’t Compel Customers to Change Channels Unless Necessary
Customers today prefer a response to their issue in the same channel they used to contact the company. While there are times when conversations need to be taken offline, businesses should aim to address problems publicly through the same channel where the inquiry was made. Pushing your customers from one channel to another is never a good idea. This leads to confusion and frustration and significantly increases resolution time.
4. Mention Operating Hours
If you can’t provide 24-hour social care support, clearly list the information across all channels. Better still, hire a BPO for managing your social customer care during non-operational hours. If that is not an option for you, make sure to list other communication channels for your brand, as well as links to other useful information, FAQs, quick-fix videos, and more.
5. Get the Right People for the Right Job
Arm your social care team with the right tools and training, and test them across any scenario. You can either integrate social experts into the traditional call center or transition and train call center members for social response. Engaging social customer care services from a reputable BPO can also be a solution. However, ensure tight integration between your in-house customer service team and the outsourced ones. This will help you quickly identify mass issues by proactively engaging your customers through posts and messages across all communication channels. It will also reduce response times and inquiry volume across social and traditional channels.
6. FAQs and Pre-Approved Information
If you analyze the queries carefully, you can identify a set of recurring questions across all channels. You can easily develop a list of these FAQs with their responses, get them approved, and store them in a content library for quick distribution. This will help you reduce social care response times and costs and improve the effectiveness of your social care team.
7. Know Your Customers
Knowing your customers and their value to your company can help you prioritize responses and decide how some individual cases are handled. A customer with a broad social footprint, or a brand advocate with deep knowledge of your product, should receive priority treatment. Therefore, social care agents must review the customer’s social profile before responding.
You must also know when most of your customers are active on social media and manage your workforce accordingly to deliver quick, efficient resolutions. The response to all customers should be prompt, personalized, and thoughtful to increase customer satisfaction.
8. Get the Right Tools
You need the right tools and technology in place to deliver more effective, efficient care. Monitoring, categorization, filtering, and automated routing, together with approval workflows and measurement and reporting capabilities, can speed up and improve social care efforts.
Like all customer service channels, you must manage social customer service quickly and thoughtfully. If you do not reduce response times or leave questions unanswered, your customers will feel undervalued and frustrated, and they will vent their annoyance publicly. Therefore, bad social customer service is worse than no social customer service.
Reducing response times in social customer service is not just about efficiency—it’s about creating a positive and lasting impression on your customers. By implementing these eight strategies, you can transform your social customer service into a powerful tool for building loyalty, enhancing your brand reputation, and driving customer satisfaction.
Ready to revolutionize your social customer service? Contact us today to learn how we can help you implement these strategies and deliver exceptional customer experiences that keep your customers returning.
Alicia Johnson
Alicia Johnson is a CX professional focused on helping organizations deliver consistent, customer-first experiences at scale. At Fusion CX, she works closely with cross-functional teams to support growth through operational excellence, thoughtful CX design, and measurable business outcomes.
