Is a Social Media Call Center Right for Your Business?
Can social media revolutionize the way you manage customer relationships? We think so—it’s one of our top tips for providing assistance when your patrons need it most. Businesses and their customers embrace social media by sharing more than 1 billion messages on Facebook every month.
A social media call center is a team that interacts with your customers through one or more public-facing social media channels. Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Reddit, and even sites like TikTok and YouTube are great resources to offer when your customers need immediate help.
Your social media presence is one of the most accessible portals into your business’s world for your customers. Here’s how to utilize it to the fullest extent, alongside all your other access points for questions, concerns, and inquiries.
Why Include a Social Media Call Center in Your Business Model?
According to surveys, approximately 64% of people prefer using a text-based service over a voice or video call when contacting a business. Businesses can often return these messages more quickly through these platforms, frequently within an hour or less.
Social media includes more than just your brand’s Facebook page. A strong Facebook social media call center team is beneficial in your customer support plan. Twitter is another example. Replying quickly to Tweets and @s is easy. The public nature of these messages also increases your footprint and drives more traffic to your profile.
At the heart of excellent customer service are a few principles: responsiveness, timeliness, the accuracy of information. Have you ever used a highly technical customer service process? In that case, you know how robotic and challenging it can be, especially in an emergency. On-site, embedded inboxes can be buggy and problematic. To us, leaning into the familiar messaging tools of social media offers a significant advantage.
How to Make the Most of Your Social Media Call Center
Once you have your accounts set up and your customer support team in place, you’re ready to optimize the functionality and efficacy of your new social media call center. Below, you’ll find some of our top tips.
1. Come Up with Guidelines for Communication
Part of the art of running a social media call center is establishing a consistent, uniformly friendly, and helpful tone. Any social media messaging done on your company’s behalf should reflect your company values and provide information from the same official internal resources.
You should train your social media call center team on your demographic, product, and any frequently-asked questions you receive. Such training facilitates a better experience for each new inquiry and allows you to answer more messages quickly. The training also avoids compromising the quality of information and assistance customers receive. When in doubt, try to standardize what you can; templates, cheat sheets, and other means of familiarization are all perfect for this job.
2. Be on the Watch for Untagged Tweets and Comments
Watchfulness may already be a considerable part of your social media marketing strategy—you might have Google Alerts for your brand name and industry niche, letting you know when somebody mentions you online.
Sites like Reddit, YouTube, and Twitter are all huge conversation hubs, and, sometimes, you might catch a customer speaking about an experience without tagging your handle. To be as thorough as possible when providing the highest quality of service to all patrons, you can strengthen the relationship by actively offering help through your social media call center, even if the message is not direct.
3. Never Drop the Ball
Our goal as a social media call center: never leave a message behind, and try to answer everything as quickly as possible by the end of the day, if you can. Our advice is to set an “Inbox Zero” goal for your social media inboxes—try to answer everything that comes through, even if the person on the other side seems like a troll.
You shouldn’t worry about conversations that devolve into random nonsense. That first message should never be ignored. A reputation for fast replies can be valuable. You’ll likely convert more patrons and keep them on your team.
Why You Should Be Using a Social Media Call Center
Chatbots are old hats—there’s nothing like talking to a real person on the other side, and social media call centers give your customers immediate service and undivided attention. Think about the last time you needed to chat about a purchase or service. How was that experience?
Sometimes, social media is the fastest way in. It’s best to implement traditional customer service tools alongside your social media. We believe that using both provides a comprehensive net of customer experience coverage. Contact ROI Solutions today—we can help you get started using a social media call center.
