Good customer service is essential to increase trust in e-commerce and its authority. But what is the best support channel? In recent years, social media has become! Find out with us how to offer good customer service on social media.

When you have an e-commerce, a very important aspect that should never be underestimated is customer service.

But today most users don’t have the patience to call or email to get the right support.

This is why assistance through social networks is gradually replacing forms considered “obsolete”. Today, social media is therefore one of the most important and strongest tools for providing good customer service.

Studies have highlighted that 80% of consumers use social networks to interact with various brands and brands.

Furthermore, solving your problems on social media is much faster and cheaper than interacting with a call center. It is also a winning solution for businesses as well as for consumers.

But how do provide the right assistance on social networks? How can you best manage your customers’ requests for help or complaints? Let’s find out!

Why is social media important for customer service?

Customer service on social media can be an important asset but also more complex than you think.

In fact, social networks are a space open to the public, and a small mistake, especially in public conversations, can cost the brand the acquisition of new customers and at the same time lead to the creation of a bad online reputation.

At the same time, it turns out to be essential, because if done well it is possible to obtain an ideal service to be able to create a good reputation, increase customer loyalty, and put the brand in a good light.

Those who deal with the assistance service and respond to messages and comments from customers on social networks will find themselves having to manage various negative reactions, will have to manage trolls, and all those negative commentators that can put the brand in difficulty.

Social media is and will also be essential for providing good customer service over the next few years as a large proportion of your customers and potential users already spend their time on these channels.

For this reason, building a strong online presence, and dealing with issues and feedback on your social channels is beneficial.

As comments are often open to the public, they can be exploited to improve brand affinity and build a positive reputation online.

By building a loyal customer base and letting customers know that you are always there for them.

This helps build trust with the audience and win their brand loyalty over a long period.

With this service and the right practices, you can have a more strategic approach to creating customer service by building a positive reputation for your business and e-commerce.

11 tips for providing excellent customer service on social media

As we have pointed out, it is important to provide excellent customer service on social media, but how do you do it best?

Here are 11 tips for an optimal strategy that will help you build effective customer service!

Choosing the right channels for customer service on social media

The first step is to choose the right channels for customer service. Choosing the wrong channels risks wasting resources by providing an ineffective service.

To understand which are the best social channels, you need to monitor the presence of customers and choose the platform on which customers are likely to find themselves mainly.

Generally, Facebook and Instagram are the most important and widely used channels also for customer service, on which you can monitor competitors and see the service channels on which to rely.

Set up brand tracking on social media

Once you have chosen the main channels to support the brand on social networks: you need to set up brand monitoring.

Through the right monitoring on social media, it is possible to have a proactive approach to customer service on the various social platforms.

The best solution is to adopt monitoring tools that allow you to set up streams that help identify posts or content on the brand from users.

In addition, you can set the positive and negative words that you mainly want to find in posts and comments.

Create dedicated assistance channels on social platforms

Dedicated support channels can be created on social media platforms. In this way, you will have the possibility to correctly monitor the requests and comments of users.

Creating a Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram page specifically for customer service helps the support team have a place to track and respond to their inquiries more effectively.

In addition, it helps to review them faster, by satisfying customer requests as soon as possible.

With a specific handle, it is possible to assure clients that there is a professional always ready to deal with their questions and complaints.

Respond appropriately and quickly

The expectations of customers on social media when they receive a response are much higher than what they get on other channels.

Generally, they expect a faster and more effective response and resolution times.

Being quick in response times identifies better customer service and allows you to ensure the user is someone who can take care of their needs.

When the time goes too far, you don’t get answers or offer them to the customer after several days, the automatic response is a negative reaction from customers, negative reviews, and a bad reputation is created around the brand.

One of the best ways to be able to respond quickly and efficiently is to create a dedicated customer service team on social media so that responses will be handled in the best possible way.

Furthermore, it is good that each member of the team has at their disposal an answer form to follow in order to be able to give efficient answers that characterize the brand.

Provide personalized customer service

When assisting on social media, you need to have a tone of voice that can identify the brand.

Furthermore, it is necessary to give answers that are as personalized as possible and that helps the customer to feel the right interest in his problem.

Customer service must be at the heart of the brand’s activities and only if done correctly can you determine a good customer loyalty rate and get the right lifetime value.

This is why we must pay attention to the answers given to customers, choose solutions that are specific, and personalized, and identify the brand and its tone of voice in the best possible way.

To customize customer service you can adopt various techniques such as: using the customer’s name that instills trust in him and providing him with useful advice that can make him understand that you can help them choose the best product or solve their problem.

Take an optimistic and customer-centric approach

Arguing or sparking discussions on social media with customers is never a good idea.

Especially if that is the goal of the haters who have perhaps left a negative comment on purpose. Or, when the customer turns out to be very upset and unreasonable.

In all cases, the social media manager who is in charge of providing public responses to customers cannot indulge in negative comments. Always maintain an optimistic approach, a kind language, and one that leads to the resolution of the problem when possible.

If they are simply trolls or people who say c activities on the brand without wanting to change their mind, it will be enough to close the speech with a polite response and in case of degeneration of the speech eventually block the user.

You need to make sure you end your answers on a note that is always optimistic to show that you are doing your best to solve the problems.

Create an internal system for managing customers on social media

To be able to manage responses to customers in an appropriate way, especially if there are several people on the team who deal with the assistance service, it is necessary to create an internal system for managing customers.

An internal system requires the creation of guidelines and SOPs to always follow when responding to a comment or request for help.

Specific guidelines along with the customer service team templates are needed to always give answers that are consistent and have the same tone of voice.

Also, always answering correctly will have an internal system that will help build a positive online reputation for the brand.

Eliminate social media conversations only when absolutely necessary

Demonstrating that you know how to handle comments, even negative ones, helps the brand build a good reputation for customer service.

Each conversation on social media is open to the public and clearly visible to potential customers and fans of the page. This can certainly be an advantage or a disadvantage in case of heavy criticism against the brand.

But why not delete all the negative comments? Thus leaving only the positive comments towards the brand?

Deleting comments, especially when other users have seen them and maybe even replied, can be a double-edged sword and lead to a negative reputation of the brand that is not able to respond to criticism and cope with customer requests.

So when to delete comments? There are times when, for example, when you leave comments that do not make sense, that are not inherent to the brand, that has been left by trolls who want to scam customers or simply denigrate the brand … these can be deleted without problems.

Respond to any feedback and comments

One of the worst behaviors you can have on social media is not responding to customer comments or feedback.

Fortunately, we can see that many brands almost always respond to all their customers, especially in the last period.

And do you know why they do it? They do this because they know how important it is to respond to positive and even negative comments, and reviews, to instill their trust in the brand and make them perceive the brand in a positive light.

Track metrics to help you improve

Social media metrics and analytics are very important to understand if you are delivering good customer service.

The monitoring and measurement of metrics allow you to constantly improve and understand which are the best answers that can be given to your customers, those that best satisfy their need to obtain an answer, and which consequently lead to better customer loyalty.

The metrics that can be evaluated also concern other parameters such as average response times, number of problems that have been solved, response rate, resolution at the first or subsequent contact, and customer loyalty rate.

You can also use sentiment analysis tools to be able to understand and evaluate how social media users react to responses to their comments and reviews.

Consider using chatbots

Finally, to efficiently manage customer service, you can integrate the use of chatbots with that of the support team.

Chatbots can be used during hours when customer service is closed, such as during the night.

Furthermore, they are useful in case of requests on messenger to answer the most frequently asked questions or to choose the best assistant based on the user’s needs which, for example, could be of a technical nature, or necessary to request a return and so on. Street.

Of course, chatbots should not replace the use of human assistants, but they must serve as additional support in response to the customer’s needs.

Conclusion

In conclusion, you must not underestimate the importance of customer service by also taking advantage of social media to provide more complete and faster assistance that increases the degree of customer loyalty.

If you don’t have a team yet to take care of customer service and respond to comments and posts on social media, you need to start creating the right strategy.

By applying it to the best you can take advantage of these channels: to assist customers, to check for any trolls and negative reviews, and finally to improve your online profile by creating a better reputation for your  Geico brand.