Social Media Customer Service: Why Your Brand Needs it (6 Platforms)

Customer service providers are an essential part of a business’s sales and marketing arsenal. Social media customer service providers assist businesses in retaining customers through happy and satisfied customer support experiences.

Raising concerns can often be frustrating for customers, whether it concerns waiting on hold for a long period on the phone or an email response. However, there’s now a third alternative earning favor: Social Media.

Customers increasingly use social media platforms for customer care needs, giving industries an opportunity to discover vital information about their clients’ behaviors. That is why social media platforms like the below are on the rise to guarantee customer satisfaction!

As customer care requests pour in through direct messages, comments, and social media posts, brands face the challenge of handling them while providing a good customer experience. This is where social media customer service tools come into space. 

These technologies simplify client inquiries on social media by providing smart strategies, all-inclusive inboxes, and AI-powered support. These powers help institutions improve customer service and offer friendly interactions so that they can convey information to customers more quickly.

In this list, we’ll explore outstanding social media customer service solutions to help you find the right tool for giving superior customer support across various social networks.

Why is Social Media Customer Service Important?

Telephonic customer service can be time-consuming because each caller needs special concentration to express their problem to the contact center agent fully. 

However, with the evolution of social media, customer care agents may now endure people who are having identical issues while together aiding many customers by presenting answers on a public forum. This approach positively impacts the brand advocacy of your business in some of the following ways:

• Customer-Centric Communication Channels: It is essential to admit that many businesses still need to leverage social media for customer service. This is concerning because most customers now favor using social media platforms to contend with companies.
• Public Customer Interactions: A growing number of customers no longer prefer direct phone calls with customer service agents. Instead, they convey their matters online, especially on social media.
• Positive Impact on Customer Perceptions: Firms must look out for their brand image on public forums and must promptly manage issues to showcase their responsiveness. This gives a possibility to leave a positive image on potential customers, displaying care and proactiveness.
• Immediate Impact on Brand Reputation: Customers have the power to swiftly control a company’s reputation by publishing criticisms or feedback on platforms like Facebook or Instagram. Uniform monitoring of social media lets companies govern their reputation effectively.

Thus, with social media customer service, customers get their queries answered, and the voice of the customer, too, can be heard for better digital marketing.

Social Media Support vs. Traditional Support

Here is the list of the differences between social media-based support and traditional support provided to customers. 

• Traditional media typically presents a broader reach, whereas social media authorizes more precise targeting of audiences – Support on social media offers the option to select audience demographics, geographic location, and optimal posting times for better customer segmentation.
• Social media support is quick, while traditional support can be delayed – Traditional media normally operates on a lengthier timeline than social media. The method can be slowed down by traditional support, as fetching customer details and solving their matters often requires more time.
• Since social media falls under the owned media category, you have the control to make updates as required – You have the privilege to alter posts or even remove messages entirely. Moreover, social media’s immediate nature ensures no lag between identifying a critical change and reaching your audience with it.
• Social media affords greater authority over the messaging compared to traditional channels – Although you cannot dictate public reactions, you do have the chance to shape the initial message. Social media promotes two-way talk, while traditional support works as a one-way communication process sometimes. The interaction cycle repeats constantly with social media, providing the public the medium to voice their feedback.

The public expects to be heard when voicing concerns about current occasions and hopes brands will provide timely responses and solutions. Professionals using social media in their daily work should be qualified to act swiftly and react properly.

Key Principles of Social Media Customer Service

Sticking to basic social media customer service best practices is essential to keep your customer base strong and foster long-term connections. Here are some key principles of social media customer service:

#1. Swift Responses: Answering promptly on social media to your customers is essential. Unlike traditional customer support channels like phone or email, social media requires an “always-on” strategy. Strive to quickly manage queries, thoughts, and criticisms to enrich your social media customer service plan.

#2. Positivity Amid Negativity: When met with negative comments, it’s important to respond positively. Instead of becoming defensive, show that you care and value the customer’s statement, regardless of the initial negativity. Remember the adage that “the customer is always correct.”

#3. Respond to All Feedback: Accepting all social media feedback, inquiries, and statements is the best practice. Listening and taking customer feedback seriously is key to convincing social media customer service.

#4. Public vs. Private Resolution: Only some cases should be settled in the public eye. Remember that you won’t be able to satisfy everyone and be trained for negative comments or fusses. Determine which discussions should transition to private media, such as direct messages, email, or phone, to address them more discreetly.

#5. Monitoring Tools: Operate social customer service tools to observe interactions across multiple platforms. These tools authorize you to listen to customers effectively, whether managing accounts as a single customer service agent or as part of a team.

Now that you know why you shouldn’t ignore social media customer service, let’s check out some of the leading platforms offering support for social media customer service. These alternatives range from affordable and basic solutions to advanced, premium-priced ones.

Freshdesk

The needs of the IT, social media customer service, sales, and marketing teams are especially met by Freshdesk.

It delivers an intuitive contact center solution that makes equipping thorough customer service across various social media platforms more comfortable.

Features:

• Convert ticket responses into knowledge-based reports for future customer queries.
• Omniroute readily assigns agent tickets based on availability, specific keywords, the requester’s identity, or other relevant criteria.
• AI-powered chatbots offer 24-hour customer support via social media platforms.
• The social Signals feature automatically pinpoints appropriate posts and renders support tickets accordingly.

With Freshdesk, companies can simplify support operations more efficiently by integrating chat channels into a single team mailbox. Because of this association, agents better comprehend customer interactions, letting them provide excellent service and raise overall customer delight.

Zoho Desk

Zoho Desk strives to provide you with the tools to deliver excellent customer service by organizing and prioritizing a huge volume of support requests across several communication media.

Using refined machine learning enables you to create and expand a knowledge base and improves the efficiency of your customer care crew.

Features:

• Zoho Desk consolidates your brand-related interactions into a single, organized space.
• Direct swift ticketing actions without leaving the social media module screen.
• Efficiently save time and gain complete control over your social media customer service actions by automating ticket assignments.
• Instead of manually setting each incoming ticket, establish assignment rules to automatically route tickets based on precise criteria like keywords, hashtags, or mentions.

You can simplify and enrich your customer service support using this versatile, cloud-based social media customer service platform from Zoho Desk linked with Contextual AI.

DeskPro

The social media customer service software from DeskPro stimulates businesses to automate their customer service operations, swiftly fix customer matters, and formulate deep connections with clients on their favored social media platforms.

Features:

• Alter customer messages from your social media pages into actionable helpdesk tickets.
• Specify a centralized social media customer support hub with Deskpro’s Twitter integration feature.
• Upgrade customer service by allowing customers to prompt discussions with your brand’s Facebook page.
• Effortlessly automate reactions and employ real-time chats from your helpdesk platform with customers.

With the help of DeskPro, customers can reach you via WhatsApp. Your helpdesk system will instantly transform their messages into workable tickets, and you’ll ensure that your responses are promptly sent back to their accounts.

LiveAgent

Combine your social media platforms with LiveAgent smoothly and facilitate customer service inquiries with a single trustworthy solution.

The influential ticketing system in LiveAgent entitles you to skillfully manage queries from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Viber, and WhatsApp in one place.

Features:

• Readily link accounts across various social media platforms, letting LiveAgent handle your social channels efficiently.
• Quickly join your Facebook accounts and observe all activities without switching between multiple tabs or accounts.
• It simplifies gathering and organizing messages, making it easy to manage any customer issue efficiently.
• Automatically convert all tracked hashtags and mentions into tickets, with the flexibility to allow them to the branch of your choice.

You can take your social ties to new heights by merging LiveAgent’s complete communication platform and social media customer service solution. Its live chat software is a specific feature with the most rapid chat widget accessible.

SproutSocial

SproutSocial can be the most promising option for your social media customer support service demands if your company desires immediate evolution.

SproutSocial’s extensive social management solution allows users to optimize their social media plans by growing audience engagement and optimizing publication practices.

Features:

• Delegate tasks and obtain notifications for all pertinent customer relations to hold complete authority and leadership.
• Forge reports that present insights into individual and team reply times and message threads, assisting in service quality checks.
• Enrich visibility across your team and boost in-app cooperation through this all-inclusive medium.
• Entrust your teams to provide responsive service and personalized care, resulting in the conversion of one-time buyers into loyal, repeat customers.

SproutSocial gives valuable analytics and insights pulled from accessible social data and collaboration powers, all on a scalable basis. 

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a cloud-based platform focusing on social customer service for managing and optimizing client conversations.

Features:

• Consolidate customer information from chatbots, CRMs, and diverse tools within a single interface.
• Tracking each customer interaction on social media, you can send surveys and collect beneficial feedback. This helps you to gain explicit insights into the quality of issue resolution.
• Employ chatbots to contend in personalized discussions with clients across social media platforms.
• Utilize savvy automation to drive higher query volumes, relieving your support team’s workload.

Using AI abilities, Hootsuite easily combines with numerous social media channels, including Twitter, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and your company’s website and applications.

Best Practices for Implementing Effective Social Media Customer Service

Just having a social media customer service platform isn’t enough; there are some additional that you need to factor in that have been listed below:

• Timely responsiveness is critical when handling customer inquiries and crises on social media to provide adequate customer service.
• Utilizing a warm and approachable tone in your social media customer service interactions substantially impacts how customers perceive your brand.
• Providing practical solutions exceeding expectations is an approach customers value, uplifting loyalty, and positive word-of-mouth.

Apart from this, it is important to actively check social media platforms to track customer queries, grudges, and praise!

Conclusion

Social media customer service is not new. However, it’s startling that many businesses still need to incorporate social media into their overall customer support tools.

Regardless of the size of your business, there are benefits to containing social media as part of your thorough customer service approach that spans various channels. The significance of offering a customer service experience must be balanced, especially now when consumers are actively committed online, discussing your brand in real-time.

By providing primary customer support in your broader customer assistance strategy across different media, you can affect your sales figures, encourage greater customer loyalty, and improve your brand’s online and offline image.

Next up, the best customer experience management software for measuring loyalty and retention.