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Social media has become the primary channel for businesses to communicate with their customers. Thus, the need for proper customer service skills to engage with online audiences both in the comment section and in their inbox is a necessity. Digital customer service requires a different approach and strategy to ensure consistency and effectiveness.
Here are some tips for creating a proper approach for your social media customer service plan:
1. Create a Social Media Customer Service Guidelines
This is one of the key ways to ensure consistency in your responses. It is important for businesses that use agencies or hire social media managers. These guidelines include:
- The tone of voice: this must include two or three words that explain the tone of the business’s message online. It needs to be concise and clear. For example, pleasant and professional or friendly yet frank. In your guidelines include practical messaging samples so that any manager of your social media platforms can replicate responses,
- Response Time: you should inform your customers about when they can expect a response from your business. Facebook and its other apps such as Instagram and WhatsApp allow businesses to set up auto-responses where you can let the customer know when they can expect a response. For example, “Hi {include customer name here}, thank you for contacting {include businesses name here}. We have received your message and a member of our team will be in contact with you within 24 hours.”
- A policy to handle customer service issues that may escalate. Typically, many companies have a procedure where the conversation moves offline and on to a phone conversation to handle certain issues. It should also include when the social media manager has to notify their manager or superior about the issue.
2. Create a Customer Q&A
Part of your guidelines must also include a frequently asked questions and answers document. Many businesses on social media will notice a pattern of regularly asked questions on their social media page. To save time, companies must have a separate document that answers these questions and then save them in Facebook’s auto-responses. That way, whoever has to answer the messages can click “saved replies” in Messenger and choose the one that best suits the question. This also gives customers the ability to choose a list of frequently asked questions and receive an answer automatically.
You can set this up easily by going into the Facebook Creator Studio and selecting “inbox”. There you can turn on or off your automatic responses and also find the edit button where you can customize the responses as well as other factors such as the timing of the response messages, personalization such as the person’s name and also include automatic images, videos or buttons.
You can learn more about it here.
3. Manage Expectations
Customers will often expect an immediate answer or solution to their problem online and this expectation is often what leads to issues or complications. This is why businesses must set up the parameters to manage their customer's expectations. Businesses do this in a variety of ways which includes:
- Informing the customers about the response time or when the customer service team is online.
- Setting up a separate social media account to deal with complaints. This is mainly a tactic for larger organizations that need to manage a large number of daily messages, for example, airline or large retail companies.
- Let customers know where they can get faster responses to urgent messages. For example, a telephone number or email address that specifically deals with time-sensitive issues.
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