Social customer service is on the rise and is becoming very popular. According to Social Bakers’ social customer care analysis, social media channels monitored by companies were only answering about 30% of questions asked through social media in 2012. Over the course of 2013, brands more than doubled their response rate to social questions to 62%. This marks a dramatic 143% year-over-year increase[1].
While it is on the rise, many customers are utilizing social media as a way to connect with brands. From the side of the business, social customer service allows you to build up your relationship with your customers and also enhance your customer service. From the customer’s perspective, communicating with companies via social media is more convenient, mobile, and alleviates the need to wait for long hours over the phone, making it more accessible.
The social customer is a radically new breed of consumer. They post online in e-review sites, in public forums, on blogs, on Facebook and Twitter. Don’t keep waiting for them to come to you and go to them. You need to make sure that you are listening to your customers’ comments and feedback. This will help you tackle any problems and prevent future issues.
There are many different tools available that can be implemented to help you help your customers before they even need to reach your Facebook page or contact your customer service center by phone. Online guidance and engagement platforms such as WalkMe (needs link) or other self-service tools can help your customers find the answers they need. Real-time chat options like LivePerson are also increasingly popular to give quick and personal support and customer engagement.
I’d like to look at a few more options in depth. Below are some platforms to help you better manage, analyze, and monitor what is going on when it comes to social customer service.
Topsy is an option when it comes to monitoring what is going on Twitter. Businesses can keep search what the latest trending topics are on Twitter, whether they are being talked about or being talked to.
Topsy’s tools can decipher how often a term is tweeted, find an influential person on a specific subject, or measure the exposure of an event or campaign. Of particular value is Topsy’s analytics capability, which helps customer experience managers study and react to everything going on in the Twittersphere.
Buffer is a site that can be used to help you automate and schedule tweets and other messages via social media. Buffer – and other scheduling services – makes it easy for brands to schedule and deliver their messages via social networks like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. This is seeing rapid adoption in the world of social customer service, especially as social media becomes a more widely accepted and important arm of any company’s public communications. The app also includes detailed analytics for all of a brand’s posts.
Sprout Social is great for all of your social media listening needs. This application is able to help you monitor multiple social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare, and LinkedIn. This application can also monitor other sites that allow customers to engage with brands and businesses. This web application is beneficial in multiple ways and also features other things such as lead generation, competitive insight, analytics, and also contact management.
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Social media listening is very important to your business and you need to be engaged and interactive with your customers. If you plan on using social media, make sure that your customers know you are there and that they can communicate with you.
(Good Old) Google Alerts
Google Alerts are another option for you to use to help you with your social media listening strategy. You will enter a search term and Google will email you when there are new articles, web pages, or blogs that discuss the topic. Google Alerts allow you to monitor things such as:
- What is being said about your company or another company
- Get the latest and most recent news on celebrities and sports
- Find out what people are saying about you
- Keep up to date on your competition
- Monitor news stories
This option is very beneficial for businesses and is also free. You can monitor many different things and will be notified when something new comes up. This will allow you to be better informed and prepared.
[1] Source – http://socialmediatoday.com/parature/1849651/13-startling-social-customer-service-statistics
