Is social media good for customer service?

Is the typical telephone setup now replaced with social networking sites?

Social media is good support for customer service. Support in a way that it can be an addition to what most have used - call and chat or even remote access. Social media especially Facebook and Twitter can also help out in enhancing the customer service of a business.

Through these sites, you can give your customers quick and immediate response. You can announce what’s new for your business, other promotion, contests, updates, bug fixes and build a wider community with your target.

Through social mentions, you can easily track even complaint/negative feedback where you can give an immediate response. Although there are also some consideration that you have to place on mind if you opt to add social media as support tool:

  • Never automate replies or mentions.
  • Careful use of hashtag especially when you are not certain.
  • Avoid using disasters or tragedy to promote whatever you have to
    offer.
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I wouldn’t say it’s being replaced, rather enhancing or extending the methods with which a customer can make contact.

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Agreed. It’s not a replacement, in that there will always be people that want to pick up the phone, but I think that if you don’t use SM for CS then you are sorely lacking. Many people (I’m one of them) don’t actually want to talk to someone, and expect a response to a tweet within an hour or so.

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My experience, both talking to and replying from businesses via social media is that it’s far too often to put fires out. For example, I won’t often tweet or even follow an airline, but when I’ve had to change planes 2 times before even taking off due to mechanical failures, I’m going to let everyone on Twitter know how displeased I am.

Sadly, your business could provide great service or products to 1,000 clients who will remain silent. As soon as 1 person isn’t happy though, they will stand on their soapbox and tell the world.

Many businesses neglect to turn the private messaging portion of their Facebook page off, messages sent there have a shorter response expectation than say, an email. Same goes with Instagram, there is no way to turn direct messages off. If someone sends you a message / question and you don’t acknowledge it in a timely manner, you’re leaving a less than desirable feeling with that person.

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Just a quick story on the subject.

A while back I was having problems with my phone line, after a several telephone calls (and being passed around several departments) I couldn’t get it resolved so I posted a cleverly worded “complaint” on Twitter. That got a very quick response, the telephone company called me within the hour and a plan to fix the problem was guaranteed immediately. Within 24 hours my phone line was back working again.

The clue here is that social media very public, big companies are having to be proactive in resolving complaints in them, else they look bad.

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Aside from Twitter, are there any other social networking sites that can be used for customer service purposes?

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@roxelgestiada - I’ve moved your post into this topic, rather than have it in a new one, as it’s discussing the same issue and it makes sense to keep it all together.

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Yes, Google+ communities are awesome for customer support. Many companies, brands and products who have Google+ profiles or pages also use communities for talking to their customers.

Let me show you an example: https://plus.google.com/communities/105420458293096745250 - this is a community for an app called Circloscope (it’s a Chrome extension that helps Google+ users gain more insights into their followers). The owner has organized his G+ community into categories such as discussions, feature requests, bug reports, questions.

Or take a look at this community: https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/112260687631793896685 - it’s about knitting, with 8000 members, started by a company that sells yarn.

As a rule, it makes sense to use G+ communities if your company has a strong presence there, or plans to start using G+, or if your target customers are on G+. I’d be happy to answer any of your questions you might have about G+, I’ve been hanging out there since G+ started.

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Facebook is also good. We’ve utilized fairly heavily over the years for SitePoint, especially at sale time.

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Social Media can help keeping a track over what customers are talking about a specific brand or a particular feature of the brand. Therefore engaging the customers is done through social media only, where the platforms act as tools for the action.

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I actually agree that social media is a good customer service. It is one of the best too! A lot of people are very involved with social media that they even prefer reading and receiving messages over there than over the phone.

Social media rocks!

I like using social media for general customer support, but usually end up asking the customer to send an email with more detail anyway. For anything account-based, or where there’s a reasonable expectation of privacy, I need to talk to them in private in order to actually solve the problem.

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people are on social media, so if u want to engage with people social media is a good channel. u need a multi pronged approach that has social media sites, emails, and telephonic support

If your customers are in social media, why not? We answer questions in social media, if the question is not too complex to answer and is clear. If the question is vague, we usually ask them to email us. Then after it has been solved, we will comment on social media that the question has been answered.

I like this approach. There’s nothing wrong than looking at a company’s social media profile and seeing a whole bunch of unresolved support queries.