How to Provide Customer Service on Social Media

1. Customer Service on Social Media: There's a frustrating disconnect when it comes to customer service. Even though we've all seen disappointing customer service in our personal lives, these firsthand experiences still haven't translated to getting these issues fixed in the workplace. Delivering customer service on social media is an opportunity for businesses of all sizes to provide helpful, seamless, and timely support that addresses many of these concerns and that's what this course is all about. How to provide customer service on social media, to delight your customers, reduce costs, and streamline repetitive processes for your business. Hi, I'm Brian Honigman. As a marketing consultant and NYU adjunct professor, I tell big brands and local businesses embrace social media as a key customer service channel. Offering customer service on social media differs from phone, e-mail, on-live chat because it's a public interaction that can be shared or others can react to it in real-time and customers expect a more timely response when communicating with a company over social media. With those differences in mind, the goal of this course is to help your business set up your own customer service program that addresses customers on popular social networks, review sites, and messaging services. More specifically embracing these channels for customer service can result in happier customers leading to increased word-of-mouth referrals, cost savings from reducing the workload on other support channels, and a decrease in the amount of customer complaints you'll receive. Whether you're a major brand responding to customer requests on social networks like Twitter and Instagram, or a local company addressing feedback on Yelp and your Google business listing, this course is for you. We'll address how to create purposeful guidelines for your program, how to choose the right channels to be active on, recommendations for responding to both positive and negative feedback, and the best ways to turn criticism into praise online. It's time your organization addresses the frustrations we've all experienced by providing memorable and exceptional customer service using social media. 2. Completing the Class Project: To make it easier to put what you'll learn from this course into action, I've created a social Customer Care Response template for you to complete as the class project. This template contains a list of universal questions that many different types of businesses, from restaurants to brands, to service providers can expect to be asked on social media. Most importantly, the document includes sample responses to these commonly asked questions that your company can use as is, or customize them to suit your circumstances. There's space throughout the document to provide your own responses to the listed questions, as well as groomed to add more questions your business is repeatedly asked. While each business will likely be asked a different set of repeat questions, the goal as a savior team time by using this template to seamlessly answer frequently asked questions, aimed to list the answers to the top 30 questions your business is most likely to be asked, then all you'll need to do is customize them when responding to feedback on social media. Once you've completed the template, I urge you to share it in the project Gallery below, so other businesses can learn from your responses and vice versa, as long as there's no sensitive information included. I'm looking forward to seeing what you come up with as you streamline your approach to customer service on social media using this worksheet. 3. Setting Social-First Guidelines: Providing customer support in social media can feel frantic because there's so many channels to consider, lots of conversations to keep track of, and it's not always clear as to how you should respond. Offset these challenges by creating some constraints for your company in the form of social-first guidelines to direct how exactly you'll provide customer service on these platforms. These guidelines should exist in an easily accessible document and outline the rules and processes your team will follow when using social media for customer support. The key elements to address with these guidelines are identifying your customer service goals, choosing the right channels, determining how often you'll offer support, the etiquette for crafting thoughtful responses, and deciding what tools will best suit your needs. Begin these guidelines by mapping out your goals to ensure all your activities are results-oriented from the get-go. Whether you'll need to collaborate with colleagues or you're the decision-maker, select 2-3 customer service goals to guide your efforts like improving customer satisfaction, reducing your fast response times, decreasing the number of customer complaints or otherwise. Next, identify which social channels your organization should use for customer service based on your goals and researching where customers are actively discussing your business. Whether customers are leaving reviews on OpenTable or Capterra, complaining in a private message on Whatsapp, or asking questions over Twitter or Facebook. It's essential you're listening and responding to customers on the right channels. From there, establish when you'll be monitoring and responding to outreach, as it'll differ per channel and when it makes sense, share the schedule with your customers publicly. For example, the American Express customer care team on Twitter lists when they're available to provide support in their bio and sometimes within the content of their tweets. Setting expectations for your team makes it easier for contributors to balance their priorities across channels and gives customers a sense of when they'll get a response. This section is also where you define what the expected fast response time is per channel, meaning how long you deem it acceptable for a customer to wait before you respond. While social response rates differ by industry, 79 percent of consumers expect a brand to respond in 24 hours, according to a study from Sprout Social. After that, the most important part of these guidelines is provide recommendations on how to craft helpful on-brand and professional responses to customers across channels. This is where you'll define writing mechanics, like what tone is appropriate with your responses, as well as the best ways to react to different scenarios like when a conversation is escalating and needs to be moved to another support channel. Lastly, it's helpful to choose what customer support tools you'll use for social media when you have a clear sense of the number of channels you're managing, the amount of customer feedback you're receiving on average, and the bandwidth of involved team members. With these elements in mind, let's dive into these guidelines to focus on the right channels, pinpoint relevant customer feedback, and improve the effectiveness of your social responses. 4. Choosing the Right Channels: Do your customers want you to answer their questions on Twitter, Instagram, both, or neither. Where exactly should you be spending your time, when it comes to customer service on social media? That is the fundamental question to answer from the beginning, to ensure you're listening and responding to feedback on the channels where your customers are active. For example, a local mom and pop coffee shop might be actively using Facebook, Yelp, and their Google listing to respond to customers as that's where they receive most of their reviews. Compared to a major coffee chain like, Dunkin' Donuts, who primarily uses Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to answer questions and address customer complaints on social media. It is so important to make purposeful choices channel wise, as you don't want to waste your resources on the wrong places, or fail to respond to customer feedback on the right channels. How do you figure out where you should be active? By determining where customers are communicating with, or about your company. If you're an existing organization, then it's a process of researching activity on the major social media platforms, to find mentions, conversations, and reviews about your company. You can do this by searching the name of your company across channels manually, or using a monitoring tool like Mention or Brand24, to find brand mentions of your business online. After doing your research, decide which platforms are the most beneficial for you to provide customer service based on the estimated amount of customer outreach you'll receive there. It is important to be mindful of your resources, and try not to be everywhere haphazardly. For instance, a boutique hotel chain may communicate with customers daily on Instagram, but decide to only respond to feedback once a week on review sites due to their bandwidth. If your company is newer, and there aren't existing conversations about the business yet, then it's helpful to understand the types of social channels that are available for customer service. There's social networks, review sites, and messaging services, all of which that fall under the umbrella of social media, but each serves different functions for consumers and businesses. Social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn public and private discussions fuel interactions on these platforms. Content is shared by consumers and companies alike, and customers can communicate one-to-one with businesses. Review sites like Yelp, OpenTable and TripAdvisor are where consumers leave reviews about businesses with physical locations, while G2 Crowd, Capterra, and GetApp are destinations where people review their experiences with business software and services. Lastly, social messaging platforms like WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger, allow customers to communicate directly with companies in a private forum, similar to texting. The type of business and its size usually indicates whether customers use one kind of social network over the other, but there's no exact rule to follow here as their usage does vary. Take your time answering these questions and conducting research to determine the best social channels to match your customer service needs. 5. Monitoring Customer Conversations: Active listening skills allow you to better understand the viewpoint of others, and as a result, you're able to craft a more informed response in a conversation. This applies to your customer service activities on social media as well. Known as social listening, regularly monitoring the conversation about your business on social media ensures you're not missing any feedback, and that you're able to craft a more accurate and timely response to customers. How and when do you monitor social media for these messages? Well, most often, you'll review the notifications from your business profile on each network. You'll typically be notified every time a customer interacts with your posts, tags your company by name in one of their public posts, or sends you a private message. For example, this is the notification tab on a LinkedIn company page where all the shares, comments and messages from people discussing an organization can be viewed. While this is how many businesses monitor these interactions on social media, notifications become less helpful when you're addressing lots of feedback regularly, and when you have to switch between multiple channels to monitor all the messages from your customers. Avoid wasting time constantly checking these networks for new notifications by setting a schedule for how often you're expected to monitor and respond to customer outreach. If you're a small to mid-size company that receives a dozen or fewer messages daily, schedule time to check social networks and messaging platforms twice a day. The exception is review sites, as I recommend checking them once a week since you're likely to see less activity there, and consumers don't expect a particularly fast response to a review. If you're a larger organization that receives more than a dozen customer support messages daily, then you'll likely need to be monitoring your social media more consistently. I recommend setting support hours, a window of time when you'll actively monitor and respond to customer outreach to avoid falling behind with your responses. You can choose whatever hours make the most sense for your organization and its customers, but many larger companies are active from 08:00 AM to 05:00 PM, Monday through Friday. The point of setting these hours is to communicate to customers when you're available to respond to their outreach and to help set constraints for your own team as well. By limiting the hours you're actively monitoring social media for customer support, you're compelling your team to prioritize answering the most important questions first. With that said, organizations receiving 100 messages or more per week on multiple channels should use a tool that allows them to monitor all of their messages from one dashboard. There's affordable options like Mention, Brand24, SproutSocial, and Agora Pulse, that offer a social inbox giving you the ability to view and respond to messages about your brand all in one place. Then there is more robust and costly options best suited for enterprise companies like Zendesk, Conversocial, or Salesforce that offer a social inbox, but with far more features. Regardless of which tool you choose, the goal is to save you time switching between channels and help ensure you don't miss any messages from your customers. Most of all, being strategic about how and when you're monitoring conversations on social media, can help your organization more actively listen and respond to your customers needs. 6. Responding to Customer Outreach: Your responses on social media must be empathetic, helpful, and professional to solve your customer's issues. Make use of the unique benefits of these channels and build trust. Before you start replying on Yelp, Twitter or elsewhere, recognize that you must consistently respond to most customer outreach, both positive and negative. The consistency of your responses can help you become known as an organization that's open to feedback from customers and willing to address their concerns in a timely manner. However, it's in your best interests to disregard, block, or report hateful, harmful, or violent messaging meant to troll your company employees or customers. With that said, when responding to customer outreach on social media, your messages must be empathetic to demonstrate that you understand your customers feelings on an issue. Social Media presents an opportunity to be less formal and more transparent by demonstrating a willingness to acknowledge customer frustrations and admit your mistakes. For example, this customer shared their frustration on Twitter about how their delivery from Thrive Market was split up into multiple boxes, one of which only contains one item. The company began their response by apologizing about the situation and describing how this was an atypical experience showcasing they understand that this was an inconvenience. Leading with an apology can help the customer feel at ease that your organization cares about their frustrations and will do their best to address their concerns. In addition, addressing the customer by name made this conversation fuel more personal which is an important detail to include with your responses to customers across social media. The use of the heart emoji at the end of the tweet helped keep the tone of the message informal and made the response feel more compassionate as if you're receiving a text from a friend. Use emojis and emoticons with your customer support responses as long as they add value to the message being shared and align with your particular brand voice. In addition to empathy, aimed to be helpful with every response shared on social media as you want to solve your customers problems or answer their questions in 24 hours or less. Try to resolve customer requests with as few messages as possible to limit the amount of effort a customer needs to put forward to get their problem addressed. One way to streamline the process is to gather all the necessary information from the customer as soon as possible to move the conversation forward. For instance, a customer left this comment on a Campbell's Soup Facebook post saying they were disappointed with one other recently purchased products. Campbell's responded in less than 12 hours, apologized to the customer by name and asked them to send over additional information in a private message to make things right. While seemingly insignificant, keeping an interaction on the same channel is helpful. It's more of a seamless experience if the whole exchange happens where the conversation started. Many companies make the mistake of redirecting customer outreach on social media to phone or email, which is very frustrating for customers and requires them to do more work. Sometimes support will be better delivered elsewhere, like when you need to verify financial information. In those cases, explain why you're asking the customer to switch channels. Lastly, every reply to customers must be professional as each message needs to present your organization in a consistent, reliable manner that's in line with your own brand voice. While your replies on social media will be shorter and more casual, it's still important to use proper grammar, spelling, and punctuation, and above all, be respectful. These specifics matter. As you can see in this unprofessional reply, the brand doesn't capitalize properly misspells a word, includes extra spaces and doesn't greet the person by name. As compared to this professional and articulate response from Nike on Instagram. That's air free, answers the question concisely and It's own brand due to its youthful, laid-back tone. Now it's your turn to start responding to customers in an empathetic, helpful, and professional manner to provide a memorable customer experience on social media. 7. Moving Conversations to Private: When a customer is upset with you over the phone, it's a two-way conversation to air their frustrations and get their problem solved. But if that customer expresses their anger with your company over social media, there's a chance that a lot more people will see the interaction. While the public nature of social media helps consumers keep businesses accountable, organizations need to know when it's time to move a conversation to a private forum. This usually involves publicly asking your customer to send you a private message on the same social network like on Facebook Messenger or direct messages on Twitter or Instagram. It's an important practice to embrace, as communicating privately can reduce the visibility of a negative experience a customer is having and can protect sensitive customer information. Let's review what this looks like in practice by reviewing this interaction on Twitter between a customer and ClassPass, a company that helps you schedule workout classes. The customer asks for a refund. So Class Pass apologized, and then asked the customer to send over their email over DM, short for a direct message, so they can locate their account. In this scenario, the company moved the conversation to a private exchange to protect the customer's personal information. Our second reason to move to a private discussion, is that the customer's questions are complex, and it'd be easier for both parties to problem-solve with the flexibility of an inbox. For instance, communicating repeatedly on Instagram comment thread can be difficult to follow. Tweets on Twitter are limited character wise, which can be frustrating at times. In these cases, a customer may ask you to message them directly, or you can suggest it yourself, to make the interaction easier for everyone. Another common occurrence is moving the conversation to private, to minimize the reach of an upset customer's messages on social media, as seen here in this dialog on Facebook. The customer is clearly upset. So KLM Royal Dutch Airlines responds to the customer by name, assuring them that they'll look into it, if they'll kindly send a private Facebook message. To make this interaction seamless, KLM includes a link that sends the customer to Facebook Messenger where they can immediately send the airline a message. Ensuring it's as easy as possible for the customer to communicate with them privately, reduces the likelihood that they'll continue to air their grievances about the brand publicly for the time being. It's important to note that in both of these interactions, each company first acknowledged the customers message publicly, and then instructed them to reach out privately. You might think simply respond to the customer privately right away is more efficient, but actually responding publicly first, notifies the customer to check their private messages. Just as importantly, other customers paying attention to this conversation your company is having, will be able to see you responding to the customer and trying to solve their issue. Thus, you're not only helping one customer with each response, but building trust in your company amongst a larger audience on social media. Remember these scenarios as you decide whether a conversation with the customer is best suited as a public or private discussion. 8. Turning Complaints into Praise: No one enjoys having their company criticized online, which is often the reason why businesses choose to ignore social media as a customer service channel. As good as it might feel to ignore or delete negative messages about your company in the short term, you'll risk losing customers and severely hurting your brands reputation. Instead, aim to turn complaints and frustration into praise for your organization by putting customers at ease, assessing the situation thoroughly, and solving their problems seamlessly. First off, an angry customer is in a highly sensitive emotional state, which is why it's essential that you always begin your replies by apologizing about the negative situation to ease tensions. This doesn't mean you're necessarily taking responsibility for what happened to you yet, but more so you're sorry, they're having a bad experience and that you're there to support them. In this review, from an upset customer on Angie's List, the plumbing repair company acknowledges the customers feelings by saying they're sorry to demonstrate they care. While it's important to take accountability for any wrong doings by your business, you'll want to quickly determine what happened to cause this situation before doing so. Sometimes, you'll be able to figure out how to solve a problem right away. In other instances, you have to do more research to respond accordingly. Which brings us to the next step, assessing the situation by reviewing their message, gathering more information about the customer, and asking them for more info if necessary. The goal is to make sure your first response is as informed as possible to limit the number of interactions it takes to help them. To do so, match up the person reaching out on social media with their order or customer file in your POS, CRM or payment system, share as much context as possible. While the speed of your response is a factor, don't respond for the sake of it until you've gotten the facts straight about what exactly went wrong. You'll often just ask customers to send over their email, order number or other identifying information privately as part of your initial reply. As seen here, sometimes you'll simply let the customer know that you've received their message and you'll respond in near future as you take the time to look into the matter. Respond like this, when the customer is very upset, repeatedly sending you messages, when your team is behind on responding or if you'll need to do more extensive research on a situation. Lastly, resolving customer issues seamlessly is the most important part of the process. Otherwise, your responses in social media can feel as clunky as phone or email support. The key to turning a bad situation into a pleasant interaction is ensuring it's resolved quickly, requires minimal effort and feels personal. We've discussed how being timely with your response as a major expectation of social customer support, so aim to reply within an hour and at the very latest under 24 hours. In addition, limit the amount of effort customers have to put forth to get support by informing your replies with thorough research, by better coordinating customer support across different channels and creating customizable templates to address repeat concerns. To make each exchange more personal, encourage your team to address customers by name and sign their responses with their first name or initials to humanize your brand. This matters as a study in the Harvard Business Review found that airline customers were willing to pay more for future flights when customer service sign their social media replies. Follow these steps to experience the joy of using social customer service to turn unhappy customers and dissatisfied supporters. 9. Providing Proactive Support: Social customer care is most beneficial when you're being both reactive and proactive. We've mainly discussed how to be reactive by thoughtfully responding to customer outreach. Now let's explore how to use social media to proactively address your customers' needs to reduce the number of messages you receive by answering their questions ahead of time. This is accomplished by sharing company updates, key product and service announcements, and helpful resources across social media to regularly address the needs of your customers. Starting with company updates, these types of posts are meant to inform customers of key changes to the way the organization operates and how it might affect them. For example, here on Twitter, MyEyeDr. is letting patients know that they're now reopening some of their offices by providing a link to a list of locations recently opened for business. The text and image included in the tweet lets customers know that there's a change to be aware of, the store openings and how they can take action, by visiting the included link. Posts like these provide details about recent widespread changes at a company, like updates to their hours of operations, promotions and discounts, shipping policies and more. Another form of proactive customer support on social media is sharing announcements about changes specific to your products and services. These announcements might not be relevant to all customers as they relate to a particular product or service as seen here with Sephora's in-store makeup and skincare services. You're usually able to book appointments at the retailer's store using Facebook Messenger, but the brand set an automated message that these services are temporarily unavailable. This autoresponder is meant to prevent customers from booking appointments, hopefully saving their team time by automating the response to this likely question about their service. Another example can be seen here with this tweet from Adobe that their design tool, Adobe Spark is momentarily experiencing issues and that they'll update customers when it's resolved. Again, taking the lead like this on social media by proactively letting customers know you're aware of an issue and addressing it can calm frustrations and answer some questions in advance. These posts help avoid confusion and dismiss rumors by empowering customers with accurate information about what's happening with your products and services. A third type of post to consider sharing proactively is helpful how-to resources to support your customers in more effectively using your products and services. Think of these resources as an opportunity to incorporate your knowledge base, answer frequently asked questions and highlight company content to educate your customers. For instance, this Facebook post from the food delivery service Zomato features a company blog post advising customers on how to effectively use their service during India's quarantine. Sharing this type of content on social media is meant to anticipate a challenge customers will likely face, provide a solution that answers their questions and reduce customer outreach. Taking this further, Glossier asked customers on Instagram to submit questions about makeup and skincare related topics, then answers them over Instagram stories for everyone's benefit. Embrace these recommendations to lower the number of messages your company receives, while at the same time, continuing to support your customers through social media. 10. Using Response Templates: Most of the questions you'll get asked by customers over social media will be repeated. You can expect that the same 30 or so questions will come up again as unique questions are actually less common than you think. Usually the distinct questions or when a customer has an issue with their individual order. But even then there is a common set of scenarios you can expect to address. To save time and be more efficient with your customer service on social media, create a social response template to prepare customizable responses to frequently asked questions. As seen here, I've included an example of this type of document with the course to give you a sense of commonly asked questions to prepare responses to. While this list of questions will vary depending on your business, you should use the sample responses as a foundation for your answers and then customize the responses accordingly. To develop a response template of your very own, collaborate with others on your team to develop a list of the top 30 questions your organization has gotten asked or will likely be asked in the future. Organize these questions into different categories to make the document easier to use once it is completed and to combine any variations of the same questions. For example, one category might be questions related to your return policy. Another on payment information, another on integrations with other services or maybe questions about your stores. Once you fine tune this list of common customer questions, it's time to craft thoughtful responses that address each question in line with your organization's brand voice. The key here is to provide an answer that will most likely address the main variations of the question while leaving ample room for the team member to further customize their response. For instance, a customer might reach out on social media and say," I'm really disappointed that I haven't been able to get through to you over the phone about the damage item I received in my last order, any help @example Inc?" In this scenario, the customer is reaching out over Twitter about damaged products they've received and the long wait times they experienced trying to get help. There's multiple ways to respond, but aim to craft a reply that might be relevant to use in a variety of situations when the customer is upset due to a poor experience with your company. You might say in response." Hi Talia, my apologies for the experience you've had with your delivery and our phone support, let's get this sorted out, please send us a DM with your full name and the order number so I can look into it I'll message you privately too, signed HK." This response is apologetic to the point and focus on helping the customer resolve their issue with as few steps as possible. To make responses like these customizable, I recommend including brackets in a different color around the parts that you suggest your colleagues alter to make their replies far more personal. In some cases, consider moving aspects of the response around when answering outreach to provide a similar answer to a question but less scripted as you can see here. Above all, work with your team members to brainstorm the best responses to these questions, so you're able to draft a reply that's universally relevant and personalized to each individual customer. Review the provided template and use it as a starting point for crafting your own responses to your most frequently asked questions on social media. 11. Offering Creative Support: It's rare to hear someone say, "Yes, their customer service was wonderful." That's because most companies follow the same rule book on how to deliver customer service, leading to clunky, slow, lackluster support provided on social media and elsewhere. The particularly unique opportunity social media provides is a chance to get creative and leave a lasting impression with your customer care that exceeds expectations. Accomplish this by offering creative support social media that's seamless, delightful and human. By seamless, I recommend that you continue to look for opportunities to make it even easier for customers to communicate with you where they're already active. Are your customers spending time on Instagram? Probably, maybe. Consider not only responding to comments, but letting customers know you offer support over direct messages, making it easier for them to get help from you quickly and effortlessly. Plus, having a business profile allows you to flag important messages and store your inbox by read and unread DMs, making the Instagram inbox a lot easier to manage as a company today. Do you have a physical location that customers visit? Then they're likely already using Google Maps to get directions to your store and reading reviews about your organization from your business listing. With that said, you might want to test turning on the messaging functionality as you can now give customers the ability to message you directly from your listing in Google Maps. While on the lookout for more opportunities like these, another consideration to keep in mind is aiming to delight customers by going above and beyond with each response. By delight, I mean making your customers extremely happy with the way you're handling their outreach in a professional and personal manner. Including media with your customer care responses on social is one approach to providing delight as including images, GIFs, or videos is that extra effort that shows you actually care. For example, you could answer a Tweet or a Facebook comment or a message on WhatsApp with a video you've recorded to address their specific concern. That's what slack that communication software provider does on Twitter by responding to customer questions and complaints with personalized images, GIFs, and videos. Here they responded with a five second video showcasing how to resize a particular part of their tool as it related to the customer's question. The additional effort of including media with your replies can help delight customers by demonstrating that you care, providing a more seamless means of solving their problems. Lastly, use social media to humanize your company and make each customer service interaction feel a bit more personal, like T-Mobile does with their tweets. Many of their responses include a link with a photo and a quick biography of the customer service rep that's responding to the customer. These bios include their picture, first and last name, job title, their interests or favorite thing about working at T-Mobile and more. Seeing the smiling face of who you're talking to makes the interaction more enjoyable and personal than talking to an anonymous customer service rep over the phone or live chat. To make wonderful customer service less of a rarity, embrace creative customer support by focusing on what makes your approach more seamless, delightful, and above all, human. 12. Conclusion: Prioritizing Social Care: At this point, you're well equipped to start creating your very own strategy for delivering customer service on social media. Once again, I'm Brian Honigman, and I appreciate you joining me for this course, diving into the details of how to provide more empathetic, helpful, and consistent customer support. We've covered social-first customer service guidelines, considerations for choosing the right channels, the process of monitoring and responding to customer feedback, how to move these conversations to private forums, and the best ways to turn complaints into praise. Now's the time to prioritize customer service on social media. These channels make it easier for customers to get your support, are an opportunity to reduce costs, and provide a range of creative options for your team to exceed customer expectations. I encourage you to complete the Social Customer Care Response template I've included with the class, as it'll save you time replying to repeat questions you're bound to get. If you'd like to stay in touch or have questions about social media, customer service, or marketing, check on my website at brianhonigman.com, to get in touch with me. Thank you again. It's been a pleasure diving into the details of social-first customer service.