Social Media Customer Service: What Is It and 9 Best Practices

Social media changes how customers and businesses interact. Social media platforms shape how people communicate and express complaints or concerns to a company. Social media platforms changed the customer experience and brought terms like “engagement” to the center of attention.

With the advent of social media platforms, there is a broader stage for your customers to reach you with questions or complaints. These platforms have also become a space where customers can spread news of how your business treats your clients. For this reason, social media customer service is a growing area where a business needs to take care of their clients. Increased communication enhances the customer experience and makes or breaks your brand.

But first, we’re excited to share something that a lot of Podium customers have been waiting for– we’ve launched an integration with Instagram! Instagram is an amazing way to showcase your products in a visual way and start a conversation with customers, but when things are siloed it means a heavier burden to keep up with things and longer response time. You and your customers deserve better!

The Impact of Social Media on Customer Experience

Social media and the ability to stay connected are transforming customer service and the customer experience. With the various platforms available, communication is seamless and instantaneous. Increased communication empowers clients to seek assistance from their favorite brands, express concerns, and share feedback. As a result, companies become compelled to respond personally and quickly, further improving engagement and the customer experience.

9 Social Media Customer Service Best Practices & Tips

Answering your phone, seeing clients face-to-face, and communicating on the various social media channels available can be overwhelming. There are some tools and practices that can help you provide the best social media customer service while working smarter, not harder. Keep reading for a better idea.

1.  Offer support to your clients where they are.

Your first challenge in using social media in customer service will be choosing where to provide your social media customer support. For increased engagement, it must be on your social media channels. For most businesses, this means Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and YouTube. Learn where your customers hang out and look for mentions and tags of your brand. This can be done with the search bars on your various social media platforms.

2.  Integrate different tools.

Expecting your team to manually monitor all social media channels is difficult. Switching between all the social media platforms your brand is on will also take too much of your team’s time. You need to employ some tools to more efficiently keep tabs on what is going on and stay organized.

Investing in a tool for social media monitoring is a smart choice. Some options include Facebook reviews, Sprout Social, Sprinklr, or Instagram Channel among others. Set your team up with training for these tools to increase communication across your social media channels.

3. Use AI and automation.

To provide great social media customer service, you need to have fast responses which can be hard to achieve. Therefore, you should become accustomed to using automated responses and AI. It is expensive to staff live agents all day, every day. Chatbots are excellent AI tools that can address high message volumes, keeping your clients informed rapidly and easily.

Although there is no social media integration (yet), Podium’s conversational AI is outcome-driven – it doesn’t just respond to inbound leads it guides conversations toward a specific goal, such as a sale or booking. Unlike other AI systems that focus on providing correct responses, Podium aims to drive specific customer actions to grow your business. Speed to lead is critical in today’s fast-paced market, and Podium offers an unparalleled advantage by ensuring businesses engage with leads within a couple of minutes—guaranteed.

Transform your business with Podium’s AI Employee. Get a Demo Today.

4. Use negative feedback as an opportunity.

It can be natural to try and avoid the issue when customers complain, but this is a bad idea for any business. Instead, make sure to address each complaint quickly and professionally. Try to get a read on the customer and understand when it is best to take the communication to the direct message box.

5. Create specific account handles for customer service.

You also can’t expect your team to use their social media accounts to respond to customers. Instead, create a company account with a specific handle that works for your customer service department and as a service channel. Not only will this keep your responses organized, but it put a professional look on your page because your responses look uniform.

6. Be responsive.

Don’t leave your customers out there hanging with a complaint, problem, question, or compliment without a response. Late responses make a brand look lazy and can lead to a customer’s distrust of the company. Be kind, professional, and authentic in your responses to each comment, and your brand will do better for it.

7. Have a dedicated social media team.

Creating a team that is dedicated to responding to your social media inquiries is an important part of your small business plan. This step will keep your responses consistent and timely. In addition, make sure to arm the team with the right tools to properly respond to a variety of customer inquiries.

8. Analyze competitor’s content strategy.

Analyzing your competitors and what they are doing on their channels has many potential benefits for your business. From gathering ideas on blog topics and content in general, to how they respond to customer complaints, looking at your competition is an important part of staying competitive.

9. Be consistent and post regularly.

One of the best ways to have a good social media presence is to post quality content regularly. Make a social media posting schedule and follow it, so your customers know when they can expect content from your social media platforms. Posting regularly also keeps your followers coming back to your social media pages.

Make sure to change the kind of content you post. Don’t always post instructional videos or promotional content. Mix it up with a video here, a useful tip and photo there, and share something compatible from another site. This variety keeps your customer base interested in what you have to say and therefore your brand.

6 Social Media Customer Service Success Stories

Many top brands set good examples of what your company can and should provide to their customers. Look at the following companies and their examples of exceptional customer service for your company goals. These can help you learn how social media is transforming customer service and the customer experience and create the right support strategy.

1. Starbucks

Starbucks is one of the leaders in terms of customer service with their social media. Those looking to make their brand stand out work hard to go above and beyond with their customer service.

There are three ways they deliver above-average, proactive customer service. These are by keeping tabs on their social media mentions. There are tools like Hootsuite that can help with monitoring this. Mentions help provide insights into how your brand is viewed. In addition, they are proactive about responding to customer feedback.

Finally, Starbucks uses its social media to build relationships. Those with good, empathetic service are most likely to be referred to friends and family.

2. Spotify

Another company that takes care of their customers with their social media accounts is Spotify. Spotify has such distinguished customer service that it won the Webby Award for Customer Support in social media.

One thing you can learn from their team is to leverage your brand on social media. Reaching out to their support team on Twitter may get you a handpicked song. They are also good at helping their client base share knowledge. It helps when you build a large pool of knowledge to draw on

3. Netflix

Anyone who spends time online is familiar with the Netflix brand. This streaming service is quick to support its customers. They jump to answer any need as quickly as possible. Fast support doesn’t mean you have to always have people at the ready; you can use tools like AI and blog articles to help keep you connected.

Netflix is also a transparent company. When they once experienced a bug that affected their customers’ experience, they addressed it head-on instead of trying to hide it.

4. Coca-Cola

A national icon, there is little doubt that Coca-Cola provides an exceptional customer service experience when it comes to its social media accounts. Even though the brand is huge, they respond to each comment effectively and provide links to further details for their inquiry. They show their customers that their comments don’t fall on deaf ears.

5. Puma

Another large brand name that is doing a good job of providing quality customer service with its social media pages is Puma. When they get a comment or complaint on their social sites they respond quickly and professionally. If their response is in private messages, they will indicate so.

6. Domino’s Pizza

When it comes to fast-food brands using social media for customer service, Domino’s shows you how it’s done. With all the deliveries and sales they do, it’s a no-brainer that their social media pages will be busy with questions and comments. Every comment gets a response from one of their reps and has a reference number as well as the rep’s name. This helps customers know that their complaint has been handled and gives them the details needed to track it.

3 Social Media Customer Service Tools

Providing exceptional social media customer service doesn’t have to be a job that you do alone. There are many tools to help you keep and maintain quality customer interactions. Consider some of the following tools and resources to help you along as you learn how to improve customer experience on social media.

1. Chatbots

Chatbots are an effective and crucial customer service tool for your small business. They save you time with your live chat responses and help keep customer relationships strong, driving your business growth. Chatbots help lighten the workload so your team can focus on other tasks. Chatbots also reduce repetitive tasks and response time.

2. Integrations

Social media network integration helps to keep all your platforms and social media channels organized and working together. This allows you to see all communications at a glance and turn out personal responses quickly.

3. Auto-Responses

Having auto-responders ready to answer any questions is a good way to keep your company efficient.

There are a variety of different companies that can help with keeping you connected with your customers. You can consider Zoho Desk, Zendesk, Sprout Social, and Podium. Podium offers a complete set of tools to keep your small business organized with their customer service responses.

How Podium Can Help Improve Your Online Presence.

Podium offers many resources to help small businesses provide top-notch customer service. From AI-generated responses to chatbots, and everything in between, the platform has the latest tools to make your job easier. You can use Podium’s resources to get your inbox more organized and their ebook for social media and small businesses.

If these aren’t resources you think you will use, you can also browse through Podium’s site and social media channels for articles and other information freely available to make running a small business easier. Make sure to watch the Podium demo to get introduced to all the necessary tools to keep your small business in regular, consistent communication with your clients.

Also, don’t let your competition beat you to new leads. Try Podium’s AI Employee today.