Social media customer service generally entails using social media to provide support to your customers in real-time. Most brands have fully embraced the opportunity to connect with their customers online, answer their questions, and solve their problems. They have also used the opportunity to get feedback about their products or services from their customers.

Providing excellent social media service is essential because it increases customer loyalty and protects your brand’s reputation. People feel more confident about a brand whom they send a direct message and get a response immediately. They are more likely to make a repeat purchase and even refer to family and friends.

However, to effectively support your customers online, you’ll need to have a strategy for resolving problems, and your customer service team needs to be aware of it. Here’s how to use social media to provide customer service support to your customers:

Anticipate customers need

There is nothing more pleasing to a customer than when businesses know their needs and provide them without being asked. Give your customers what they need by anticipating and resolving them through blog content or video tutorials.

Customers love when brands share content, teaching them how to use their products or even resolve issues themselves without needing to contact the customer or technical service.

Set up a handle for customer support

Most brands separate their customer service support social handles from the main brand’s social media handle. You must have noticed brands directing you to their customer service handle when you ask a question or need to resolve an issue. The reason is to be able to attend to their customers’ needs without interruption from the activities of the primary handle.

After creating a different handle for your social media customer service support, ensure you mention the handle on the bio of your primary channel so that customers can easily reach out for help. Also, ensure you are always responding to customers who need to resolve issues from your support handle rather than the main one.

Make the customer service team a priority

Social media customer service should be the priority of every business, especially those that have taken the step to make their business visible online. Your customers are the drivers of your business, and without them, there are no sales or profit, which could lead to the demise of any business. 

Similarly, your customer service team is the most important department of your business because they relate directly with your customers managing their emotions, and provided feedback about their behavior and needs to the company to help it make future decisions that will bring growth and development. 

When made a top priority, your customer service team will make decisions that will affect your business positively even without your intervention. You need to ensure they are a top priority when creating a strategy to offer customer support online. 

Have a customer support strategy

Your customer service team needs to have guidelines to use when responding to customers. These guidelines should mirror your company values and how much you respect your customers. When mapping the strategy on responding to customers online, look at the tone of voice, response time, FAQ answers, an issue resolving receipt, and protocols on how to deal with escalated issues.

There are so many surprises your customer service team can face when handling customers online. And any dissatisfied customer can quickly try to tarnish the company’s image, which is why businesses should come up with a strategy to take care of their customers online and limit distractions.

Make response a priority

Nothing can be more frustrating to a customer than sending an urgent message and not getting an immediate response. And the truth is most people expect a faster response from businesses on social media, which is why they contact brands there in the first place.

You need to ensure your customer service team responds to your customers’ messages and even the comments they make on your post. 

You don’t want your brand to come across as one that goes silent on customer inquiries. It will only show you don’t care about your customer’s needs, which could discourage others from purchasing your products and services. Ensure you respond to your customers and do so quickly to prevent any discontentment that may lead to a bad online review. 

If you are not available to respond at a particular time, make it known to your customers so that they wait until when you are available rather than asking questions and not getting a response. Then also endeavor to have resources that can answer commonly asked questions. Include a link to this page on your social media profile.

Also, ensure they know of your helplines’ existence where they can call in to ask their questions and get their problems resolved.

Use chatbots

Chatbots are another way to ensure your customers are getting the answers they need without delay. They offer 24/7 customer service, which helps when you are not available to attend to your customers, probably because you need to sleep like every other human being. 

Customers can get the information they need from these chatbots depending on how you program them. Chatbots can only answer simple, frequently asked questions, but they do so immediately, which will leave your customers impressed.

Know when to make conversations private

You can resolve some issues in the comment section, and there are those you’ll need to address privately to avoid distracting your followers or keep the customer’s information private. When a customer comments, you should discern whether to keep the conversation going or to ask them to send a message. On Twitter, you can make it easy for your customer to send you a private message by adding a private message button. To do this, add this link https://twitter.com/messages/compose?recipient_id=[numeric user ID}. To get this ID, which is quite different from your account’s handle, go to your profile, select Settings, and privacy, and then click on “Your Twitter data.” You’ll see the numeric ID below your Twitter name.