Customer Service in Social Media
How Online Customer Service is Good for Your Business
You’ve successfully created social media pages and attracted a lot of followers. One day, you signed in and saw some inquiries from a customer about a faulty product. As you do not know what to do, you ignored the questions and turned to the contact center to solve the problem. Days passed and the customer felt neglected. This made the customer complain about bad service, which further worsened the issue.
If you were the boss, how would you have solved this matter?
Customer service is not just served face-to-face or over the phone anymore. It can be delivered through your social media pages, too. For example, look at how Cathay Pacific, an airline, handled an inquiry and two issues:
Notice when the customer shout-outs were entertained? The replies are prompt and phrased in a polite manner. This helps appease boiling tempers. Figuring out solutions and advising customers online is more convenient than speaking to customers on the phone. A few taps on the keyboard and a mouse click, and you’ve managed to respond to your customer.
This is why you need to train your customer service staff in responding to inquiries and complaints using social media. There’s a sense of urgency when a customer complains on a social network, and quick replies can smoothen out a potentially harmful situation. This damage control method is more effective than contacting a customer days after an inquiry. It diminishes the destructive effects and the nightmarish PR efforts needed for entrepreneurs to neutralize a sensitive issue.
If you provide good customer service online, satisfied customers would…
…spend more and tell at 42 online about the satisfying customer service they received. This results in huge returns for your business if you start engaging customers online, instead of relying only on traditional means. Making your customers feel cared for will encourage them to do business with you. Additionally, this makes them feel comfortable dealing with you because you assured them that you would serve their requests in a timely and courteous manner.
Cultivating good customer relations online earns you a good reputation among your followers. They will be further encouraged to write positive reviews about you. Once other people see these reviews, they will be more likely to buy your products and services. Companies with a good image online drive more traffic to their website and promote further customer engagement. Customers are more content and businesses earn more profit; a win-win situation, all around.
Customer service has long moved on from sending letters to the manager and irate messages to the contact center. Now, social media gives customers a more effective way to reach entrepreneurs. Business owners who ignore this development will earn a bad reputation for not responding to customer inquiries, complaints and other concerns. You have to perform extensive reparations if you don’t keep providing good customer service through the social networks. You can prevent these problems if you promptly and politely reply to your customers’ questions.