Saturday, May 7, 2011

5 Tips For Developing A Better Social Customer Support

How easy is it today to get customer support? Digitally easy.

No matter where customers are, they can tap the shoulders of your company’s representative with a press of a button to ask for assistance. This is possible because of social media’s real time customer support channel and these customers are now able to control the conversations. Control here refers to the ease and increased frequency of customers using social media.  In the company’s part, it is a chance to constantly engage the customers and continually satisfy them.


Satisfaction is the objective. A customer can either be someone who just expresses his/her thoughts and opinions or someone who is not likely to be happy about a company since he/she uses social media for complaining. Regardless of the latter, both of them give you more reasons in developing a better social customer support so here are five tips for social customer service success:

1. Social Influence Is Not The Only Basis

After seeing someone who is very influential (say Klout score) pouring out negative messages about your company, would you focus most of your attention to that customer? Not really. He or she may not be as loyal as someone who is not so influential. Therefore, don’t fully focus your attention to a customer just because of influence.

2. Go Real with Time

A lot of real-time data flows through the stream of social media every second.  You should have a great tool that can’t miss a single data for you to respond. That is rule no. 1 in social media marketing for an effective customer support - Listening.

3. Have a Centralized Customer Data

Any customer data that is handled by someone else in the company should not be privately confined to a specific representative. Customers are not into waiting because the co-representative is not available. Your system must allow you to track the issues and give the appropriate response the other co-representative would. 

4. Intra-cooperation

Actually it’s also great to have a social support internally and that means the employee can handle any customer inquiries. In each part of the business, a socially-oriented company will also make traditional customer support equally satisfying. 

5. Legal Matters

Regulations tell us what is right and wrong to say in customer support. There are times when customer service requires you to get sensitive information such as birth date and any other private numbers. Make sure other people see it happening but the correspondence is only viewable or heard by the representative and the customer, such as transactions on phone and email.  Establish your customer-oriented reputation.

Here are the basic rules of thumb: Listen then engage customers equally. Don’t make customers wait. Everybody in the company should be social. End.

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