Social customer service is an important 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 cater to your customers through social customer service, you need to offer quick responses and resolutions.
Exposed to the gold standard of customer service, consumers today want answers to their queries and resolutions to their issues, and they want it right now. They do not have time to wait for a day to get a response to an email or to wait in an IVR queue to talk to another human. In such situations, social customer support can come to the company’s rescue. When done rightly, the personal, knowledgeable, and helpful nature of social customer service can resolve customer issues promptly, drive better customer experience, and boost brand reputation.
But the question is, how can a brand with limited resources, small teams, and isolated departments (CRM, helpdesk, customer support, and social) deliver faster and 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 personally by empathizing with them and their issues. This creates the opportunity to diagnose an issue further, leading to 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 let the customer know that they are on the case and that the brand cares for its customers. Customers today are willing to wait a little if the company acknowledges their requests or issues.
In case an issue cannot be resolved right away, agents should give the customer a timeframe and stick to it. A little delay here and there is okay, but do not go a whole day past the deadline to provide a response. This way, your company can lose its precious goodwill.
3. Don’t Compel Customers to Change Channels Unless Necessary
Customers today prefer to get a response to their issue on the same channel through which they interacted with the company regarding the issue. While there are times when conversations need to be taken offline, businesses should attempt to respond to issues publicly through the same channel where the inquiry is made. Pushing your customers from one channel to another is never a good idea. This leads to confusion and frustration and increases the resolution time significantly.
4. Mention Operating Hours
If you can’t provide 24-hour social care support, have the information clearly listed 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 of your brand, as well as links to other useful information, FAQs, easy-fix videos, and much more.
5. Get the Right People for the Right Job
Arm your social care team with the right tools and training and test them against any type of scenario. You can either integrate social experts into the traditional call center or transition and train call center members for social response. Availing the social customer care services from a reputed 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 identify mass issues quickly by addressing your customers through proactive posts and messages across all communication channels. It will also reduce the response time and volume of inquiries through social and traditional channels.
6. FAQs and Pre-Approved Information
If you analyze the queries carefully, you can always find a list of questions that are repeated time and again 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 the social care response time and costs and improve the efficacy 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 wide social footprint or a brand advocate with deep knowledge about your product should get priority treatment. Therefore, social care agents must look for the customer’s social profile information before responding.
You must also know when most of your customers are active on social media and manage your workforce accordingly to provide quick and efficient resolutions to all your customers. The response provided to all customers should be prompt, personalized, and thoughtful to increase their satisfaction level.
8. Get the Right Tools
You need to have the right tools and technology in place for more effective and 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 speed up the response times or leave questions unanswered, your customers will feel devalued and frustrated and vent their annoyance in public. 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.
