Boost Customer Service Experience with Social Media Listening

In the past, brands mainly focused on using social media as a communication platform to promote their business and to boost SEO in Florida. But, that’s no longer the case, as more and more people are using social channels for customer service.

According to J.D. Power, 67% of consumers use social media to communicate customer service requests. Facebook also reported that more than 20 billion messages are being sent to businesses from customers each month.

Seeing how social media plays a crucial role in customer service, especially for modern consumers, companies are shifting their focus towards social media customer service - and using this as a channel to grow their business.

How about you? Are you still using social media mainly to acquire new customers?

While bringing in new customers is and will always be important, we believe that now is the best time to start servicing your existing customers better than ever.

See, your customers are contacting you through channels they prefer, and they expect you to respond. The first step towards providing your existing customers a better customer service is to respond promptly.

But of course, your job is to do more than just respond. It’s to win them over by providing an excellent social media customer service experience.

So, how exactly can you do that?

In this article, we will share with you tips to create a positive social media customer service experience for your customers through social listening.

Before we discuss that in detail, let's first define what social customer service is.

What Is Social Customer Service?

Social customer service is all about providing customer service beyond traditional channels, such as email and phone. It focuses on offering customer support through a mixture of public and private messaging on social channels like Twitter and Facebook.

Many organizations are also extending their customer service through OTT messaging services like WhatsApp or Line. This only means that omnichannel customer service is becoming increasingly important for businesses, and will soon become a necessity in the future.

Social customer service involves using social listening and management tools that will allow you to monitor several social platforms from one place. This will allow you to see direct feedback through tags and messaging, check for relevant keywords and mentions of your brand, respond to both positive and negative comments in real-time.

Why Is Social Listening Key to Providing a Better Customer Service Experience?

A lot of people use social media to share their experiences with a brand, express disappointment on a recent purchase, and show that they're happy and loyal to the businesses that deserve it.

This is why social platforms are a data mine for marketers and business owners.

With the right tools and strategy, social listening can help you learn more about your customers, assess how they feel about your brand, manage your online reputation, improve customer experience, and build brand loyalty.

Here’s how social media can help you learn more about your customers, their sentiments, and the market:

• ‍Find out what people think of your brand to get an insight into how you should position your brand in the market, improve your offerings, and change your messaging. ‍
• Discover what problems customers have with your products or services to make the changes necessary to provide them with the product offerings or services they want. ‍
• Identify what questions customers ask to create content that answers their questions and identify what’s causing their confusion. ‍
• Learn about the solutions people want to think of new features or offerings that will satisfy what your customers and target audience want. ‍
• Determine sales leads. By identifying where prospects are in the buying process, you can find leads. ‍
• Stalk your competitors. Knowing what your competitors and doing and not doing put yourself ahead of them. ‍
• Find customer service issues to respond to complaints promptly and turn a negative PR situation into an opportunity to impress and keep an existing customer.

How to Leverage Social Media Listening to Create Better Customer Service Experience

Find Out Which Social Platforms Your Customers are On

The first step is to find out which platforms your customers are most active on.

Is it on Facebook? Instagram? TikTok?

One way to discover where your customers and ideal customers are mostly spending their time on social media is to look at social media users demographics data. This will give you an insight into which social channels you should use for social listening.

If your customers and target audience are adults of any age or gender, then you should use Facebook.

If you’re trying to get your brand in front of young female adults, then Instagram is your go-to platform.

If your target audience and customers are Gen Z and Gen X, then you should go for TikTok.

When starting, don't overwhelm yourself by listening on all channels. What you should do is focus on one or two channels first. Once you’re able to figure out and come up with a system that can make the most out of social listening for your business, then you can add more channels to listen on.

Decide on the Social Listening Tools to Use

People talk a lot about brands and businesses on social media, and most of these conversations happen without the knowledge of the companies involved.

When you aren’t tagged in a social media post directed at you, you have no way of responding to their remarks. The only people who can see this conversation are the authors and their followers.

Now, this can put you at a disadvantage, especially if they’re saying negative things about you. There’s no way you can respond and try to fix the problem.

This is where social listening tools come in handy. You can use them to track and monitor conversations about your brand that are happening in real-time.

Here are some of the tools we recommend:

• ‍Google Alerts to help you monitor and follow discussions about your brand on the web. ‍
• Hootsuite to keep track of how your customers feel about your brand across all major social networks by simply typing in keywords, phrases, and hashtags.‍
• Mentions to keep an eye on brand mentions on blogs, websites, forums, and social networks from a single easy-to-use user interface.

Track Conversations and Get Involved

64% of consumers expect to receive real-time customer service. It is estimated that customers expect a social media response within 60 minutes or less. Yet, according to research conducted by Convince and Convert, response times in social media could range between 15 minutes to 24 hours.

If you can’t respond to a customer right away, make sure to acknowledge them and let them know that you’ll respond to them as quickly as possible.

Facebook and Instagram are already providing auto-replies you can set up to let customers know you’ll get back to them as soon as you can.

To make sure that you can respond quickly to any customer service requests or queries, and take part in the conversation, you need to set up alerts and notifications. This will let you receive real-time updates every time a conversation about your brand happens.

Some of the most important alerts you should create are:

• Your brand name and misspellings
• Your CEO’s name
• Keywords
• Industry buzzwords
• Brand slogans
• Top competitors’ names

After setting up your alerts, you may start tracking conversations and take part. However, it’s imperative to choose which conversations to participate in, which to avoid, and which to simply take note of.

Being in the wrong conversations can become a PR disaster for you. If you’re not sure which conversations to join, respond to customer service requests and customer complaints first.

Identify Patterns of Common Problems

Since you can now keep track of every conversation about your brand that’s happening on the web, it’s easier for you to identify patterns.

What issues keep resurfacing and are a common concern among different customers? You can use this to identify much bigger problems that require more than a one-time refund to fix.

This is great for your company because you’ll be able to see the bigger picture and actually find the root cause of the problem. It also provides you an opportunity to get things right with your customers by finding a long-term solution to their problems - and not a band-aid remedy.

What’s more, you can use these patterns to solve customer problems before they even occur.

Respond to Customer Complaints Right Away

47% of people turn to social media to complain about a bad experience. Unfortunately, 79% of those complaints are ignored.

If you ever receive a complaint on social media, make sure to respond to them quickly and apologize, even if you weren’t tagged.

People are more than twice likely to give a company a second chance if they say sorry than being offered compensation, which is why you should get things right with your disappointed customers by apologizing and taking the conversation offline.

Sending an email or calling them can add a personal touch and sincereness. This is also a chance to discuss matters in-depth.

Respond to Positive Feedback

Any engagement you receive on social media, even if it’s negative, should be acknowledged.

Getting positive feedback from your customers not only benefits your online reputation, but also helps build trust and influences prospects to buy from you. In fact, 81% of consumers have purchased a product based on a social media post from someone they’re following.

So, don't ignore positive feedback. Flaunt them. Repost positive feedback, posts, and reviews on your social media accounts, and don't forget to say a personalized thank you in your captions.

When you engage with natural brand advocates, it also motivates your other customers to post about you. The more people rave about you online, the more it’ll attract potential customers.

Plus, the more positive reviews you have, the better your SEO in Florida will be and the higher you’ll rank in search results!

Are You Ready to Take Your Customer Service Experience to the Next Level with Social Listening?

Social platforms like Facebook and Twitter are the perfect place to identify your customers' wants and needs, and acting upon them. So, take advantage of social listening to guide you in creating the kind of social customer service experience your customers expect from you.

If you’re struggling to provide an excellent social customer service experience for your customers, we can help! Our team of social media marketing experts here at Digital Resource will craft a personalized social listening plan that will help not only boost your SEO in Florida, but also put you ahead of your competitors.

Contact us today to get started!