How Social Media Can Personalize Your Customer Service

Using social media for customer service used to be a trend; however, now it’s used regularly by a variety of companies. Providing customer service through your social media sites has a number of advantages — personalizing your customer service is just one!

How Is Social Media Being Used?

Research in this area has produced a number of interesting results. Harvard Business Review discovered that the most important thing that keeps a customer loyal is when you save them time. Fortunately, customers consider social media a time-saving, self-serve customer service because they’re typically on the social media sites for other purposes.

Twitter’s research has shown that customers are using Twitter for customer service at a rate that has increased 250 percent in the last two years. Other platforms like Facebook are also seeing significant increases in social media customer service.

What Are the Benefits of Using Social Media for Customer Service?

As mentioned above, communicating on social media is fast and efficient. It helps customers meet their desire to save time. Here are some other benefits.

Social Media Allows for Personalized Responses

When someone contacts you on social media, your customer service representatives (CSRs) have the opportunity to learn more about that person from their profile. Therefore, even if the person isn’t an existing client, the CSR can still make a more personal connection.

If the person making contact is a customer, you have even more opportunity to personalize their experience. Technology that allows you to gather everything that you know about a customer, and then integrate that information into a central system, can give you an amazing competitive advantage.

How impressed do you think a customer would be if, rather than asking them for their order number, your CSR could find that order in your internal system based on recent transactions, and start the conversation with that context already in mind? With the right technology, the opportunity to personalize social media customer service is almost endless.

Social Media Allows for Direct Communication

When a customer fills in an online form to get customer service, it’s not possible for you to quickly ask questions to get clarification. With social media, you can engage with your customers in real time, or close to it. If you respond to every question or comment on social media quickly, you’ll encourage customers and prospects to use it more often. That increased interaction will help to keep your brand top of mind.

Social Media Interactions Have a Wide Reach

You may not think that resolving customer problems in a public forum is a good idea. However, there is a benefit to using that approach. When other users see your interaction with a customer and realize that you respond quickly and work diligently to resolve the issue it does wonders for your brand.

Naturally, not all issues should be resolved online. For very complex or emotion-packed issues, use the social platform to move the discussion offline. Once the issue is resolved, customers will often go back to the post and let others know that you solved their problem.

Next Steps?

Using social media for customer service isn’t just a trend — it’s the future. If you’re not using it, now is a good time to start! Please download our ebook: Customer Engagement: Driving a Better Experience Through Self-Service.

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