Every brand needs to understand its market and customers well. With the extensive use of digital and social media platforms, brands now have a way to know and understand their audience. Social media has become a window through which brands can look at their customers’ wants and needs, and can even start researching into them. Social media today performs more as a customer experience platform than as a communication platform. Hence it makes sense for organizations to sift through social media in order to inform and improve their customer servicing efforts.
How does Social Media help with Customer Service?
On average, every visitor on the Internet spends about 2 hours 22 minutes per day scrolling through news feeds, liking, and sharing. They also like to interact with businesses as customers to provide feedback and seek service and support. This practice drives more and more attention to social media, making brands invest more in them. Earlier they’d just maintain a business page, but now they offer customer service. And rightly so, because more than 65% of customers today rely on social media for customer service. According to Insights guide, Facebook reported that each year, more than 1 billion messages are sent from customers to businesses.
In addition to this, companies that do not respond to customer messages on social media face up to 15% increase in customer dropouts. Surveys have also established that 86% of customers are willing to pay higher for improved customer experience. These are some of the reasons why companies are beginning to focus on improving customer service on social media.
Social Listening to Improve Customer Service
We now clearly understand that customers are lodging complaints or inquiring about products/services via social media. But, how do brands get notified? Or make sure that all such comments and posts are brought to their notice, as soon as someone talks about your brand? This is a real problem because only about 3% of all customer service messages that are posted on Twitter actually tag the brand. Yet, customers do expect a quick reply and do not hesitate to escalate their attack to the next level, when no response is forthcoming.
This is where a brand gets support from Social listening. Social listening allows you to find out in real-time whenever someone mentions your brand. It sends you an alert about what they are saying. Furthermore, there are many other ways in which social listening can help you. You can read about them all here. For now, let’s focus on how it helps to improve your customer service.
Why use Social Listening?
The easiest way to impress your customers is to know about their needs and of course, by taking quick action when they send in feedback. Imagine having to track all the comments online manually. After you have done that, you may end up with about 300 reviews and comments to address in a day. Remember, every customer expects an immediate response. The sooner, the better. Many of the comments present a new issue to be resolved. Trying to compartmentalize them manually and respond will require a lot of time and effort. Social listening tools use AI to simplify this laborious process.
The tool tracks all comments and sends the relevant ones to your dashboard. Next, the tool runs various analytical tests and presents you with the most useful data. So, say if your store in Newark is lacking proper seating facilities and a majority of the comments are about that. This will appear loud and clear on the topic cloud on your dashboard.
Social listening in a way, also helps you gauge your audience’s mood. Say you launched a product. Sentiment analysis charts will read the positive, neutral, and negative comments and chart them for you to see whether people are happy with your product or not. This provides a quick snapshot of how your audience perceives your brand. You can then dig deeper into the causes.
Let’s quote customer service veteran, Sally Gronow, here: “Good customer service costs less than bad customer service”. Social listening helps brands to reach out to customers and create connections. Keep practicing this strategy and you would have a loyal customer base in no time.