Social Media – Customer Service

Couple of weeks before I participated in an online group discussion on Social media based customer service management. Many organizations starts with social media in its marketing and communications, and as they began monitoring for brand mentions, they quickly discover they were intermediaries between the customer and the customer service department.
They are the most qualified to respond via social media, as they are the ones responding by phone and email.

There are few interesting things I noted in the overall discussion.

1. The person monitoring for mentions, whether they are in corporate communications or customer service, needs to know what to do with customer service requests when they find them. Make sure you have set internal expectations for response time.

2. If you already have established customer service response times, develop a social media response times too that fits within the culture of your organization. Make sure it is something that you can meet, because you want to post this publicly and set customer’s expectations for the response.

3. While customer service reps have always been on the front lines representing the company, if they will now be responding using social media, they need to understand the etiquette of the platforms. Some people can get a bit snarky when posting on social networks, and some of that grows out of the informal nature of the conversations. Informal or slightly fun is okay in your responses, however, they also need to be serious.

4. Your customer service reps can tell you the 10 most common questions asked by customers and prospects. Write a blog post for each one of them and use keywords in the titles so people can find them using search. This is the inbound marketing approach to customer service.

5. Simple responses to common questions can, and should, happen publicly. But real issues that require research or detailed conversations need to move offline. As soon as an issue is identified in this category, respond publicly with an email address or a request to send contact information via Twitter Direct Message. Other people following your company need to see a response, and the customer with an issue may require a response that is longer, and not appropriate for public channels. Frequently, customers who have raised issues using social media will post a positive comment once the issue is resolved. The ongoing perception that your company cares about its customers and wants to solve customer issues is important. If this is not true, using social media will be a challenge.