How to Provide Customer Support on Social Media Faster

Providing customer support on social media isn’t optional for brands these days. When it takes days or weeks to get a reply on social media, your customers lose interest in your brand, which can ruin your reputation.

The days when using phone calls were enough to provide customer support are far behind us. Over the last few years, customer expectations have changed. People expect brands to offer omnichannel customer service, and they want to get their customer requests solved on social media.

As Market Force explains: “The emergence of social media has given consumers a whole new way to interact with the brands they love — and a forum to complain when brands disappoint.”

Whether you like it or not, people send their customer requests on social media to help your business make your product or service better and tell other potential customers about their experiences. Millennials—those born between 1982 and 2000—are the largest and the most powerful consumer group. Thus, you’d better understand the psychology behind marketing to Millennials.

• 67% of consumers have used social media for service-related needs
• 65% of people between the ages of 18 and 34 find social media to be an effective channel for customer service
• 45% of customers users share bad customer service experiences via social media

When it comes to customer support, 66% of Millennials say their customer service expectations have risen in the last year. Customer expectations means they want to get an immediate solution. And the faster you do it, the better. In this post, we’ve gathered five marketing tips for brands to solve customer requests on social media faster.

1. Optimize social media accounts for customer support.

Today, it’s essential for brands to be where their customers are, so many companies listen to their consumers’ needs. Social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter have evolved to customer service channels. If you want to provide your customers with excellent customer support, it’s crucial to answer their questions quickly, so optimizing social media accounts is a must.

Whether you use Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter, there are many ways to optimize your social media account for customer support to make it easier for customers to contact you and avoid missing a single message.

• Add contact options
• Turn on notifications
• Create a brand hashtag for customer inquiries
• Collect customer feedback with tools

All people are different, so it is no wonder that all of us have different preferences when it comes to customer support, too. The more contact options you offer, the better. And Lulus on Instagram is a great example:

 

For Lulus, Instagram is a goldmine for acquiring customers. To start selling on Instagram, you need to put your customers first and solve their requests. When visitors or followers want to contact the company, they have several options on how to do it: send a message in-app, make a phone call, or send an email. If your customers want to share their pain points with you, listen to them. It can help you understand them better, improve your product, and therefore increase customer satisfaction. Thus, you need to encourage them to share their stories on social media, and optimization for customer support is a must.

2. Create quick replies.

Modern customers reach out to their favorite brands on social media to ask common questions about their products or services. If your followers frequently ask the same questions via direct messages, you can create a list of previously formatted responses with the quick replies feature on Instagram and Twitter.

It helps to save time on typing the same reply to various people so that you can provide your followers with an instant solution. What is more, it’s a proven way for your customer support to have the right information without needing to verify each response with you. After all, productivity and customer experience go hand in hand.

Plus, you can also install quick replies for Facebook messengers. When you respond quickly and consistently to private messages, your page can get the badge that will also tell other followers that they can get a quick solution. Check out how Booking did it:

 

When you manage different social media accounts as Booking does, checking social inboxes and brand mentions without missing a message is harder. Luckily, with so many cost-effective social media management tools on the market, it’s easy to bring everything into a single stream and therefore avoid missing customer requests.

3. Manage separate customer queries feeds.

Whether you’re a big or small company, having a separate customer query feed can be a good idea to keep all customer inquiries in one place.

Let’s take ASOS, for example. With almost 17 million followers across all social media platforms, the company manages comments from satisfied and dissatisfied customers. Their customers slide into direct messages or mention the brand on their accounts. Thus, ASOS has the separate official customer feed for queries on Twitter:

Since the company also gets a lot of customer requests on Instagram and Facebook, ASOS invites worried customers to ask their questions via the Twitter help page. Here’s how it looks like:

 

ASOS apologized for the delayed response in customer service and offered an alternative solution. With a great number of customer requests on social media, you can redirect your followers to a separate customer service feed. It’s the easiest way for your customer support team to provide worried customers with a prompt response. Moreover, social media analytics data can help you understand which social media networks your audience uses more often. Then, you can choose the right platform for collecting social media requires.

4. Hire a freelance moderator.

tips as mentioned above, it’s important to monitor the comments and feedback from followers 24/7. Monitoring comments means you need to have a social media moderator. Yes, it can be costly to organize a separate in-house customer support team for social media customer service. However, you can use online workplaces such as Upwork or Freelancer to hire people for customer support team who can moderate social media accounts and help admins.

When you hire a freelance moderate, dealing with comments, brand mentions, and direct messages is easier. What is more, you can find a person who has experience in customer service:

5. Stay proactive and show empathy

According to Hubspot, only 1 in 26 customers will tell a business about their negative experience. With a variety of options on the market, customer loyalty is key to success. To keep your existing customers and acquire new ones, it’s important to provide proactive customer service.

Being proactive means providing help before customers ask for it. When you make the first move to help customers, it shows empathy and helps your customers feel valued and appreciated. As a result, it helps to increase brand loyalty and trust. Just take a look at an example from WholeFoodMarket on Twitter:

Once a dissatisfied customer shared his experience on Twitter, the company reacted immediately to solve the problem. Whether you want to reward your loyal customers or apologize for the specific inconvenience, it’s a good idea to send gift certificates that show you care about your customers, and you want to improve customer experience.

In a Word

Customers turn to brands’ social media profiles to share their customer experience, ask questions and complain publicly. Now customers have an opportunity to express their thoughts and beliefs without being interrupted. This means other social media users listen to these customers and trust them. In other words, it affects brand reputation.

Not only should brands solve customer requests on social media, but they should do it fast to satisfy their customers and stay ahead of their competitors. With the above-mentioned tips, brands can solve customer requests on social media more quickly. Don’t miss your opportunity to increase customer satisfaction and bring your business to the next level.

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