Allowing a comment to go unanswered or taking too long to reply to a mention are among the biggest mistakes made by online players.
Social media customer service is the latest resource that enterprise leaders are implementing to uplift their organizations. Enterprises are leveraging social media in a way that builds brand awareness, promotes sales and improves community relations.
Exceptional customer service promotes growth and provides businesses with coveted firsthand, word-of-mouth referrals, which remain unsurpassed as the best way to elevate brand credibility. Using popular social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, savvy business leaders are magnifying the value of their brands.
Today, consumers post their opinions – good or bad – on a digital global stage, making it more critical than ever for business leaders to ensure that they are effectively managing their online presence and engaging with their consumer base.
Allowing a comment to go unanswered or taking too long to reply to a mention are among the biggest mistakes made by online players.
Resultantly, adept organizations now manage their social media assets around the clock using specialized monitoring software. The enterprises maintain teams that respond immediately to online comments and reviews as well as social media mentions.
The following excerpts reveal 4 more ways that enterprise leaders use emerging social media practices to improve customer service.
1. Transparency
Social media provides enterprises with a fast, simple and transparent channel for communicating with consumers. Any consumer with an Internet connection can see and watch your customer service activities via social media.
This means that companies and organizations have the opportunity to really showcase that they are a top-notch enterprise that really cares about and listens to their customers.
If companies fail to respond to media mentions, it’s going to be obvious to everyone using those social channels.
2. Reduced Expenses
Social media customer service is the most cost-effective way to respond to consumer queries and concerns. It costs about $1 per interaction, while traditional phone support costs around $6. More than half of all United States consumers use social media platforms.
In addition to using social media to connect with family members, friends, and professional peers, consumers are increasingly adopting social media as the way to reach a customer service representative at various enterprises. In fact, 67-percent of today’s consumers use social media to connect with brands.
3. Improved Customer Service
Customer service representatives should be there to help, not to hide. Enterprises with poor customer service spend valuable resources attempting to repair brand credibility and image, and too many customer service platforms are difficult to use and can seem to take forever.
Not only do you make the customer come to you, but you also waste a good deal of their time. By meeting consumers where they spend a lot of their time – social media – you can greatly improve the quality of your customer service.
Despite the fact that rapid customer service response is the new status quo, only 12-percent of today’s enterprises respond to social media customer service inquiries – at all.
Obviously, firms have a lot of work to do before meeting this new expectation, presenting an opportunity for enterprise leaders that bring their organizations up to par. In the end, impeccable customer service improves enterprise profits.
4. Direct Access to Target Market
Social media cuts out the middleman and gives companies and organizations direct access to their target markets, enabling firms to see what consumers want, what changes they’d like to see and what enterprises can do to improve their performance.
This is especially true for improving performance within marketing efforts. Thanks to social media, audiences are calling out companies and organizations that are making missteps in regards to social and political values.
Take diversity, for example, where up to 83% of audiences have found marketing campaigns most successful when they better represent our diverse modern society.
Studies show that 49-percent of consumers will make a purchase after receiving a prompt response to queries via social media. Consumers who receive prompt responses through social media channels are more likely to remain brand loyal and provide word-of-mouth referrals.
When implemented correctly, social media customer service encourages consumer spending, improves operational efficiency and increases organizational performance.
While forward-thinking executives use social media to optimize service efficiency, they also use the resulting data to gain valuable insights into consumer-enterprise engagement. Big data analysis helps enterprises form strategies for meeting corporate objectives.
This information provides a priceless understanding of what customers want and need. Additionally, the insights garnered from social media engagement analysis helps enterprise leaders stay a step ahead of their competitors.
Moving forward, the demand will increase for rapid-fire customer service delivered via social media platforms. In order to deliver exceptional service, business leaders will ensure that company representatives fulfill consumer expectations quickly using this invaluable resource.
Source: SocialMediaWeek
