Almost 60% of consumers are willing to pay a premium for good customer service, and social channels are a key place where consumers seek out help and advice from brands. Offering customer service on social media is increasingly seen as a differentiator for successful businesses, because it has such a big impact on how people perceive an organization - so, no doubt you’ll want to get involved!

Before you do though, you’ll need to think about a few things. For starters, although customer service on social channels doesn't need to be 24/7, you still need to be clear about when you operate and how people can find you. It’s also useful to make your response times clear, so that consumers know how long they might have to wait to hear back. And, crucially, you’ll also need to make sure you’re able to provide a positive, consistent and helpful service!

To help manage all the support requests coming through, many companies are turning to AI tools to manage workflows and monitor queries. These tools work by automatically sorting support requests by complexity, which frees up the main social team to focus on simple issues and leaves social experts to handle more complex issues. This means that all enquiries get seen and no one gets missed. And, it also helps you gain valuable insights into the most common problems, which you can then work to solve so they don’t impact consumers in the future.

Even when you have an efficient tool in place, you’ll still need to make sure you use skilled people at key points, and deploy social listening tools to help you quickly identify when problems are escalating. It’s much harder to build back from a crisis, than to avert it in the first place! And, although this does sound like a lot of work, the benefits of doing customer service on social media do make all this effort worthwhile. In fact, some brands have even become renowned for going the extra mile…

Take shoe retailer Zappos. When a shopper contacted the brand to say that the shoes for her bachelorette party were the wrong size, Zappos quickly responded by sending the correct shoes, a personal note and a wedding survival kit. The bride-to-be was so delighted that she posted about the kit, note and her praise for Zappos on Facebook.

It’s moments like these that have helped the brand become well known for its excellent customer service, and it sparks a lot of user generated content and social shares from the moments of surprise and delight that its team delivers.

Customer Service