Posted by Social media is known for bringing friends and family together. But with the time and advancements in the platforms, now it is also known for bringing businesses and customers together.
There are so many ways in which businesses are leveraging social media for acquiring customers as well as retaining them.
Basically, social media has become the next generation of customer service. Though marketers continuously innovate new customer acquisition tactics, the evolution of social media has changed the game altogether.
What is social media customer service?
Social media customer service is nothing but the action of retaining potential customers by responding to their queries, problems, and demand using social media platforms.
But all these things can also be done by call centers, then what’s the need of social media customer service? Most of the marketers and businesses wonder why, whereas many of them might think it’s a fad.
Before knowing why social media customer service is necessary, let us look into what an effective customer acquisition strategy should involve.
- Discovering your target audience
- Listening and engaging with your audience
- Finding the right platform to promote your business
- Providing solutions to existing customer issues
- Managing your customer acquisition campaigns based on performance
- Optimizing user data to personalize messages
- Creating shopping opportunities
Social networking platforms provide much wider reach to your target audience, making it a significant element of your customer acquisition strategy.
Why is social media customer service necessary?
According to research by Statista, approximately 2.65 billion people were actively using social media in 2018, and the number is estimated to increase to 3.1 billion till 2021.
This clearly denotes the power of social media, and by using it, you can undoubtedly increase your customer retention even when brand loyalty and customer attention are low.
Here are five valid reasons, which will help you to get a more precise idea about the necessity of social media in your customer acquisition strategies.
Benefits of Branding
Customer experience is a crucial factor in the success of any business. And how a customer is experiencing majorly depends upon the products and customer support you are providing.
Answering a complaint on social media not only helps to increase brand advocacy but also lets you gain more customers with word of mouth marketing. When customers have a satisfying experience with any brand, they are more likely to share it with their friends and family.
Also, when a brand reaches out to their customers on social media regarding their queries and complaints, then people start to show loyalty towards them. Therefore, by providing excellent social customer service, you can win both positive brand image as well as brand loyalty.
Social media is fast
As the world is getting faster, people also expect to receive an instantaneous response from their favourite brands. The fact that social media never turns off apparently increases the expectations of customers.
Also, letting your prospects and customers waiting on hold is so 20th century. In fact, customers cannot take it anymore, and thanks to the speed and efficiency of social media, they do not have to.
With the help of social networking platforms, businesses can reach thousands of people around the world at any moment, irrespective of the demographic, location, or type of the customer they want to reach.
However, this doesn’t mean that call center agents have to work on multiple screens, sitting with numerous tabs open. Of course, that’s not possible.
Structured customer service includes keyword-based monitoring software that looks for the brand mentions and relevant conversation across the specific platform, then routes them to the best agent. This way, customers will receive fast, response-driven answers, and hence, feel more connected with the brand.
Key point: There are hoards of software available in the market, but choose the one that fits your requirements and help you deliver the best to your customers.
One-to-many communication
The traditional customer service where agents provide support to the customers through phone or email is one-to-one communication. This means it only stays between the two-person- customer and service agent.
Whereas due to the transparent nature of social media, whatever conversation you are having with your customer can be seen by anyone who is following you or that particular brand. It will be open communication. And, the posts on social media have a wide-reaching tendency which cuts down the repeat queries.
People who have similar kinds of queries will get their answers automatically, which will save both customers and companies time. Large establishments often take advantage and purposely viral their response on social media so that it can reach as many people as possible.
However, nothing is more overwhelming than public pressure. Remember, each of your responses is a public representation of your brand. So, make sure your response should be fast and relevant.
Saves time and resources
Social media can help your service agents work more efficiently. They can serve more customers with the same efforts and the same amount of time as compared to the call centers.
The best part is, this strategy works well for all sizes of business. Therefore, through social media, you can increase customer engagement and improve your efficiency without increasing your team size.
Instead, you can invest in some tools that can help you streamline your workflow and lead to skyrocketing your customer service efficiency.
Receive customer feedback for free
Feedback, comments, and likes are something that keeps a business going. What a company is doing and what customers are thinking are two different things. That is the reason many brands invest in expensive surveys to get feedback back from the people.
But now, with social media, you can immediately know how well the people receive your product/services. Whether your campaign is doing good or it needs some fine-tuning. You can catch every reaction on social media that, too, for free. Plus, the response you will get will be from a global audience. It doesn’t come from any specific section.
Conclusion
Social media is growing, and there is no sign of slowing down. So, the major takeaways from this article are to stress more on the importance of having social media in your customer acquisition strategy and the right tools at your disposal.
A proper strategy will help you reach your goals, and an appropriate tool will help you know the mentions of your brand. Then, you are all set to start your social media customer service.
In case you are already running one, let us know what has worked for you in the comment section below.
This is a guest post by Sumit Ghosh. Renowned performance marketer, user acquisition expert, and a product fanatic from Bangalore. He is a prominent speaker in masterminds and events in the performance marketing space. Sumit is the Founder of Socioboard, which owns products like PowerAdSpy, Socinator, Gramboard, DominatorHouse, and mobile apps in the social media automation space which have millions of users.
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