If You Don’t Use These Social Media Tips to Improve Customer Service, You’ll Hate Yourself Later

Wondering why you need to improve customer service using social media? Because social media interactions can make or break a business.

A recent study showed that 50% of consumers expect a response from a brand or business on Twitter within an hour.

On Facebook, the expectation is similar, with 42% of customers also expecting a response within one hour.

If you don’t respond to messages within an hour — let alone the same day — chances are customers will see your business as a real donkey.

Brands that stand out like unicorns are the ones that respond swiftly, to both messages and reviews. That’s why you need to know how to improve customer service using social media.

How to Improve Customer Service Using Social Media

Here, discover actionable ways to ensure your customer service lives up to expectations and is boosting your bottom line.

1. Quickly Respond to Messages

When you receive a message from a customer, it’s important to quickly address their concerns and answer their questions.

Increasingly, people are using Facebook Messenger to reach out to businesses.

In order to respond to them quickly at scale, Facebook Messenger chatbots are a must.

You can set up Q&A triggers so that the bot answers frequently asked questions immediately.

For example, if your business often gets questions about location, you can set up the chatbot to provide your address and offer directions whenever the work “location,” “address” or “directions” are mentioned over chat.

You can do this for a variety of queries, and a live operator can take over at any time if the queries are more complex.

2. Respond to Every Review Respectfully and Never Argue

As a business owner, you must maintain your cool.

No matter how rude or untrue a review is, you have to remain calm in your responses.

Fighting back against a negative review will only make you look bad, and potentially result in more negative comments and responses from the reviewer.

Instead, try to approach every review as an opportunity.

Someone didn’t like your service?

Take the time to ask them why.

They’ll feel heard, and you might learn something in the process.

If you’re able to fix their problem or clarify a concern, it’s likely they’ll edit their review for the better.

This is critical, as reviews impact not only your online reputation, but your Google Local listing ranking.

3. Create a Facebook Group

Building an online community centered around your business is always a good idea.

You can create a Facebook group for your customers to join.

Members of your group can now start discussions, share opinions, ask questions and communicate about your products or services.

Establish community rules and have moderators to make sure the group is running smoothly.

If you make the group public instead of close, put up questions that new participants must answer to join to prevent bots from swarming in.

4. Be Friendly, Respectful and Helpful

Whenever you interact with a customer online, be warm and welcoming.

It’s key to be friendly and helpful, rather than stuffy and, well, business-like.

The same applies to your Facebook Messenger chatbots.

When you create scripts for your chatbots, make them as human-like as possible.

Even though a chatbot is talking, it shouldn’t sound robotic.

Republished by permission. Original here.

Image: Depositphotos.com

This article, "If You Don’t Use These Social Media Tips to Improve Customer Service, You’ll Hate Yourself Later" was first published on Small Business Trends