Nowadays, social media is for more than just connecting with friends. It’s where people shop, engage with brands, and look for customer service. It’s this last point that your call center may want to start thinking about. Offering customer support through social media could be a way to stand out from the competition, strengthen brand loyalty, and improve your bottom line.

This guide covers the ins and outs of social media customer service for call centers and other types of businesses. Keep reading to learn how your company can benefit from this practice and to find detailed instructions for getting started.

The benefits of using social media for customer service

Meet customers where they’re at

The average user spends about 2.5 hours on social media every day. That means if you ignore these platforms, your brand won’t have a presence in one of the places where your target audience members spend the most time.

Competitors can (and will) step in to fill this void. So, the first benefit of offering customer support on social media is ensuring that you don’t lose your competitive edge.

Improved brand loyalty and advocacy

There’s also research suggesting that the use of social media for customer support can increase brand advocacy by up to 25%. That means more customers sharing your company with friends in real life and across their social media profiles. It increases your brand’s reputation and can help build loyalty, according to this data.

Stay on top of the conversation around your brand

Another factor to consider is that customers are going to talk about your business on social media, whether you’re there to see it or not. By maintaining active accounts, you at least have an opportunity to contribute to that conversation and help shape it – especially if you decide to address customer complaints and inquiries publicly.

For example, when a customer Tweets at you or posts to your Facebook wall, you can address it right there instead of messaging them back directly. This shows other customers that you care about your clients and resolve their issues promptly. It’s a way to improve the reputation of your brand that many businesses don’t take full advantage of.

Gather new data for enhanced analytics

Data analytics has become increasingly popular as more and more businesses realize the insights it provides. If you’re not familiar, it essentially means using the information your business has already to learn more about things like its target audience.

Offering customer support through social media can help with this. It can serve as another way to gather data about the types of questions your customers ask and the types of resolutions they’re happy with. Since all of this information will be text-based, it will be easier for your company to feed it into analytics models that may generate powerful insights you can use to optimize customer service in your call center moving forward.

Leverage customer service AI bots to provide 24/7 coverage

Finally, offering customer service via social media makes it easier to provide expanded support hours to your customers. You can do that by staffing humans to monitor your accounts or supplement the work they do with AI chatbots that can answer basic questions on their own.

Chatbots don’t offer the same level of service as humans (at least not yet). But they can serve as a point of contact between your business and its customers during odd-hours to help people get the answers they need even when your team isn’t available to provide them.

How to use social media for customer service

Now that we’ve covered why it’s worth using social media for customer service, let’s take a look at some tips for doing so. Use these strategies to get as much out of this tactic as possible.

Identify the platforms your customers use most frequently

A good first step is to figure out which social media platforms your target audience uses most frequently. For example, if you sell consumer products to a broad customer base, you might focus on Instagram and TikTok since these platforms tend to be the most popular.

However, if you sell B2B software, you’re probably not going to connect with many potential business clients through Instagram or TikTok. It would likely make more sense for you to focus on LinkedIn and Twitter.

If you’re not sure which platforms you should use, do some research into social media demographics. You can then match those with your target audience’s demographics to see where you’re likeliest to find the most customers.

Of course, you can always try to have a presence on all major social media platforms. But this could stretch your team thin. At the very least, you would want to allocate the bulk of your resources to the platforms with the highest concentrations of your customers.

Determine how you’ll respond to customer support requests via social media

Next up – think about how you would like to respond to the customer support requests you receive on social media. The key decision here is between setting up an AI chatbot or putting people in charge of responding to customers who message your accounts.

Bots are cheaper and available 24/7. But they can’t answer in-depth questions as people can. Because of this, it may be smart to ask people on your team to respond to customer support inquiries received via social media and then set up a bot to answer basic questions during odd hours when people aren’t available.

If you plan on having multiple people respond to social media support requests, it’s worth creating internal social media guidelines. These should define the kind of language employees should use when talking to customers and include any prohibitions or rules you want to ensure they follow. Having these internal guidelines can increase brand consistency for customer service via social media as well.

Always respond

This tip may sound basic, but it’s so important that it’s worth making it explicit. If you plan on offering customer service through social media, you need to make sure that you’re responding to every request you receive. Otherwise, you’ll be setting up a percentage of your customers for frustration and your brand could lose standing to the competition because of it.

To make sure you don’t miss any messages, consider ensuring that an employee reviews your accounts every so often. For example, you could set up a spreadsheet that employees have to sign showing they checked each account every hour. That way, if a message is missed, it will be easy to see who didn’t see it.

Pay attention to the competition

Since you’re going to be on social media, it’ll be important to consider what your competition’s profiles look like. For example, how are they offering customer service through their accounts? What kind of posts do they make? Do they engage with customers outside of simple support requests?

You don’t necessarily need to do everything that your competitors do on their social media accounts. But you don’t want to look like you’re missing serious services in comparison to them. Also, knowing what your competitors are doing is the first step in figuring out how to separate your company’s social media accounts and customer service.

Look for opportunities to partner with other brands

In recent years, brands have become more adventurous with their social media accounts. Many post memes, respond to jokes their customers send, and generally try to act like the average social media user.

Your brand will need to develop its own voice to stand out and build loyalty with its customers. But one thing it can do in this area is find opportunities to partner with other brands in related industries.

For example, if you sell software, respond to posts made by companies that sell complimentary services that don’t overlap with your own but may be targeted by the same audience. This can help you build relationships with other businesses that could turn into partnerships or at least help you stand out in the minds of customers.

Monitor performance and adapt

Finally, be sure to monitor the performance of your social media customer service over time. You may want to track metrics like response timelines, success rates, and whatever other details you think are relevant to your company’s mission.

Get expert support with your call center’s social media customer service

Offering customer service through social media is a relatively straightforward process. But doing it in a way that stands out and helps your brand increase loyalty can be challenging – especially when you run a call center.

That’s why you should consider contacting The Cattalyst. We have decades of call center experience and can help your business find the ideal way to offer customer service through social media.

But don’t take our word for it. Sign up for a free consultation today to get personalized advice and to learn more about how we can help.