How to measure your customer service via email and social media

 
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Email and social media are two efficient channels to assess your customer satisfaction.  

Ignoring the fundamentals of tracking customer servicecould be detrimental to your business. The overall satisfaction can be measured, of course, by many traditional approaches such as survey your customer, call and thank them as well as conduct focus groups.But they are not enough. Here we focus on two effective digital channels – email and social – to help you improve your customer service.

Email

Email is one of the most efficient channels to assess the customer experience with your brand. For example, you can use email tools like Survey Monkey to deliver a set of surveys in order to receive qualitative feedback.

In the process, one question is how often should you send emails to track and measure your audience satisfaction?

There’s no single benchmark as you need to analyze your data points to decide the frequency.

“You should optimize frequency for each individual. For example, a loyal customer may want to receive an email from your brand every day. But if a consumer doesn’t have a tight relationship with your brand, he or she may only want to receive an email on a bi-weekly basis,” says Nick Edwards, chief executive and co-founder of Boomtrain.

Boomtrain measures its own consumer satisfaction on a quarterly basis. But if a company has a huge consumer transaction volume, say Amazon, it can measure on a daily or a weekly basis, according to Edwards.

Aside from assessing the overall consumer satisfaction, email can help bring unhappy consumers back, especially those passively upset ones who historically open emails but all of a sudden stop engaging with a brand.

In that case, brands can conduct re-engagement campaigns by either sending push notifications or customizing emails such as “We Miss You, Yuyu” or exclusive deals.

“Dedicated emails that trigger exclusive activities and predict consumer happiness are very effective at re-engaging the customer and bringing them back to the brand. In doing so, brands are not treating every consumer the same,” says Edwards.

In terms of measurement, he adds that it should be based on both an individual basis and a cohort basis. A cohort could be associated with the time when someone first signed up for the service, or it could be based on other attributes such as location and age.

When it comes to specific metrics, marketers should not overlook open rate, click-through-rate and engagement rate. But more importantly, they should keep an eye on downstream metrics such as time on site, return frequency, and the purchase size if e-commerce brand.

Remember, email is just one entry point so it has to be taken holistically to an overall consumer experience.

“It’s a mistake if marketers measure email customer care in a silo instead of having a comprehensive view of what’s going on,” says Edwards.

Social media

Compared to email, social media is a one-to-many channel rather than one-to-one. Social messages are less likely to be customized for individual followers but the advantage of social is that brands can publicly showcase their commitment to customer service and how helpful they are.

For example, Royal Dutch Airlines has established a dedicated customer service team on Twitter 24/7.

It’s hard to measure social customer care because it usually requires fairly robust teams fully dedicated to that side of the business. In addition, a lot of legalities and red tape could come to play in responding to customer satisfaction issues on social.

While Nick Hoppe, vice president of strategic marketing at Movement Strategy, says that his agency decided to shy away from handling customer satisfaction for its clients due to the above reasons, it does provide guidance when brands aren’t necessarily handling this aspect of social as best as they can.

Based on his experience, Hoppe believes that what all brands should be doing is measuring semantic context on social.

“For the brands we work with audience sentiment is a very important measure of success on our part and often an important KPI in campaigns that we run,” he says.

In these cases, Hoppe’s team always asks the following questions:

• Are they responding with personal messages or using canned content?
• Is the content being well received?
• Are they quick to respond or is it taking several days?
• Are they responding to most people or are some people having to message them multiple times before they get an answer?

All of the above are indicators used to identify how a brand’s social customer care can be improved.

In a nutshell

No matter which channel you choose, you should measure through both quantifiable metrics qualitative feedback.

And when you assess your customer service, you need to look beyond regular metrics like open rate, click-through-rate and engagement rate in email, as well as likes and shares on social.

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Five brands nailing multichannel customer service

Multichannel customer service is a must in 2016. Who’s doing it best?

If digital has disrupted the marketing industry, that’s nothing compared to how much its complicated customer service. There are now many more ways for brands to reach consumers, but the reverse is true as well. And whichever method they choose, they expect it to be seamless.

According to the 2015 U.S. State of Multichannel Customer Service Report from Microsoft and Parature, today’s consumers regularly use four different channels when interacting with a brand. Of the 1,000 people surveyed, 92 percent expect brands to have self-service customer support pages and even more factor customer service into their brand loyalty.

Cross-channel customer service has never been more important. Which brands are nailing it? Here are five examples.

1. Amazon

A few weeks back, I contacted Amazon after failing to receive a package. Full disclosure: the whole thing was totally my fault; it was my first order after moving and I forgot to update my address. Still, the situation couldn’t have been easier to resolve. On Amazon’s customer service page, you enter your phone number. Less than a minute later, someone calls it. Problem solved.

User experience is a facet of customer service and Amazon’s is designed to make life as easy as possible for shoppers, right down to the “Buy it Again” buttons on your previous orders.

2. Lyft

Lyft is extremely user-friendly from the first second. As soon as you open the app, you see the different car options with both corresponding times and explanations of what they are. Making an inevitable comparison, I can’t be the only one mystified by terms such as uberT, uberXL and UberRUSH, right?

Lyft goes multichannel by having a driver call you to confirm his or her location, as well as yours. Given how most ride-share users tend to be concentrated in big cities, it’s a nice touch that eliminates a lot of potential confusion.

3. Nordstrom

In the retail world, Nordstrom is well-regarded for its customer service. Looking at the brand’s Twitter feed, it’s easy to see why. All tweets, whether positive or negative, seem to get prompt responses in the kind of conversational language that really makes you think they were written by an actual human.

Rather than simply say the item wasn’t available, Nordstrom volunteers a similar item, taking the onus off the user to find a replacement themselves.

Going beyond social, the retailer’s website also has a Live Chat features with several options, depending on what you need to discuss.

4. Southwest Airlines

Delta sends emails reminding you to check in, but only seems to respond to the positive comments on social. Virgin doesn’t send those reminder emails, though it does call to check on you if you’re late for boarding (Sorry, everyone on my flight to Las Vegas!) But of all the airlines, Southwest’s customer service is the most well-rounded.

The airline’s Twitter feed is almost entirely comprised of tweets to consumers – there have been four new ones since I started writing this section – and it reminds you to check in and it emails you to let you know of changes to your flight. According to J.D. Power’s 2015 North American Airline Satisfaction study, the average airline scored 717 out of a possible 1,000 points; Southwest’s score was 781.

5. L.L. Bean

Between August and October, StellaService administered a survey and found that L.L. Bean has the best customer service of any brand (from this list, Nordstrom and Amazon-owned Zappos also placed in the top 25). In addition to a very responsive social team, the Maine retailer has a very involved website.

Like Nordstrom, there’s a chat option and like Amazon, you can enter your phone number to have someone call you. But L.L. Bean minimizes your need for either of those services with its detailed FAQ page, a one-stop shop for everything from order tracking to a sizing chart based on measurements.

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9 Ways to Use Social Media to Improve Customer Experience

Ten years ago, less than 10% of US citizens had any kind of social media presence. Now? Over 75% of Americans have social media accounts and use Internet frequently. This explosion of social media has led to our approach on marketing a new twist.

With the rapid growth of the Internet, there comes the eventual adaptation and migration of businesses going online. One of the ways they do this is by utilizing social media, a concept that has expanded and become so complicated that it is considered its own industry of employment. It is unlikely that a business dealing with customers could approach social media from a secondary viewpoint; employing someone for the express purpose of handling the company’s social media profiles is the go-to and the recommended path to take.

Check out these 9 ways to use social media to improve customer experience. Try them out and see what happens, you might be surprised with the results!

1. Use your social media page to interact with your customers.

Many businesses, seeing the usefulness of having an online presence, create a social media pages and groups on sites like Facebook or Twitter…but only use these pages to distribute promotional material or service announcements. It’s rare for a page to interact with its customers, and it is one of the biggest “features” you can add to your company. Customers love being able to rely on having reasonable contact with a business they purchase from and social media is one of the best ways to go about that today.

2. Check up on your social media page regularly.

It’s absolutely necessary to maintain your page once it’s been made. Nobody is going to follow a social media page if there is no activity and especially no sign of presence by the business. Simply put, if you go through the effort of having a social media presence, you need to check on it regularly. Daily if possible. This allows you to answer customer inquiries promptly, deal with negative feedback, and quell spam/troll posts before they blow up and alienate your customer base.

3. Link your customer service department with your social media team.

If you’re a big enough business to have a dedicated customer service representative as well as a social media manager, it might be a good idea to link these two together. Many small businesses make this happen by ensuring that there’s a single person doing both jobs, but you can also make this come about by having both the customer service team and the social media team work together with customer inquiries. They have very similar jobs, only different platforms in which they work. It’s important that the problems or solutions one team grapples with can be easily accessed by the other team.

4. Ensure that your social media team knows what your normal employees know.

There’s nothing worse than being a customer, talking to a business’ employee in their brick-and-mortar store, going online, and then receiving completely different information from the business’ social media manager. Which person is right? You won’t know…until you do some digging. This should never be the responsibility of the customer; indeed, it should be expected that the customer receives the right information on the first try. If your social media team is authorized to comment on your business policies, make sure they actually know what they are in order to avoid confusing and frustrating your customers.

5. Respond to feedback, even if it’s simplistic or without complaint.

Just like how you should actually interact with your customers when they field complaints or ask questions, it’s still important to interact with them even if there’s nothing wrong. A simple “thank you” goes a long way in encouraging customer involvement with your business online. Likewise, if you have a specialized business (such as in the arts and crafts industry), providing suggestions to customers who are venting or otherwise just chatting on your business page can encourage customer loyalty. This leads to our next point…

6. Your social media team should be acquainted with your product.

Have you ever contacted a business’ customer service department or posted a message on their social media profile, and then realize after they respond that the employee doesn’t actually know what they’re talking about? It’s frustrating and it discourages you from ever contacting the business again. Why bother since you know more than them anyways? Make sure that anybody you assign to dealing with your social media pages knows a thing or two about what your business offers. Providing training documentation is an excellent way of ensuring they get brought up to speed quickly.

7. Run social media exclusive contests.

Many businesses post coupons, flyers, and promotional material on their social media pages. Most often, these posts are simply rehashes of what can be found in their actual physical store. One way of encouraging your customers to follow and appreciate your social media presence is to offer an incentive. Online-only coupons, contests, and more can all generate customer involvement that may not ordinarily be present. It’s a quick and easy way of getting a few extra likes and even getting a few more sales.

8. Keep personal opinions quiet.

This is seen far too often. Businesses with an online presence slip up, make a personal statement on their page, and then need to deal with public backlash. This can work out in some cases, but in most it’s seen as distasteful. This can be due to simple unprofessionalism or because the business is picking the wrong time and the wrong place for their owner or employee to get up on their soap box. Generally speaking, it is safe to assume that your customer only want to read material related to your business when they visit your business’ social media pages.

9. Keep an eye on what your customers want…and give it to them

Monitoring what your customers are saying on your social media pages is a no-brainer. You have to do it. What you also have to do, however, is take what they say into consideration when you decide what to change with your social media strategy. If a large portion of your customers are commenting that they want a certain feature or element to be added to their viewing or buying experience, it may be a good idea to implement it. It breeds goodwill with your customers and lets them know that you care about what they think.

Parting Thoughts

If you’re doubting the validity of adopting some better social media practices, just remember the story of Mark Zuckerberg. He wasn’t the first person to create a social media platform. In fact, when his creation of Facebook first entered the scene, the likes of MySpace were still on top. What made his creation so much more successful? There are different answers, but one of the big components is that he listened to his users, changed the site to consistently make it more accessible to others, and ensured that it was built on a model of sustainability. As a result, Facebook saw an exponential success rate, which made Mark Zuckerberg one of the richest I.T. billionaire in world, his current net worth is $42.7 billion dollars.

Those were just 9 ways you could enhance your customers’ social media experience when it comes to interacting with your business. Do you have any more that you feel are worth sharing? Did we get something wrong? Let us know what worked for you, especially if what worked for you happens to be something shared on the list above.

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Getting it right with social when everything we know is wrong

Though still relatively new to the marketing sphere, social media has undergone many incarnations. As a communication tool, what is its true branding value and purpose?

There was a time in history where the prevailing wisdom of scholars was that the Earth was flat; the brightest minds of their time were certain that reaching the end of the world meant reaching a cliff, rather than an unending continuation. When reflecting on the early history of social media and the views of the visionary class, you might be forgiven for thinking their opinions represented unwavering fact.

Consider just the following views, starting with sheer viability (especially in the wake of MySpace’s demise):

• Facebook remaining relevant as audiences grow older? A fad that will age poorly.
• Facebook scaling an audience? Impossible.  
• Pinterest? Mom’s play site. 
• SnapChat? Your kids' sexting app.
• Of course earned media will always reign supreme!

The early wisdom of the social space was one of distance – it was not a place for brands and digital marketers. It wasn’t until brands noticed the ongoing dialog that the industry began to rethink this. Social platforms presented a new opportunity to connect directly with audiences, and, in a quick 180, brands began talking to people as if they were long-lost friends and family.

But the desire to make social the new source for customer service has also created as many problems as it has solved. Brands struggled to find balance between buying exposure and favor with earning trust and inclusion at every turn – that is, until the 2013 Super Bowl.

Everyone knows the story of the blackout during the game and how Oreo's real-time response via its "Dunk in the Dark" tweet changed everything we thought about social. With reported figures suggesting more than 500 million earned media impressions, this was a historic moment for the industry and a huge moment for brands.

Power out? No problem. pic.twitter.com/dnQ7pOgC

— Oreo Cookie (@Oreo) February 4, 2013

Now brands had a new purpose – to find its own Oreo moment. Many have tried, yet few have succeeded - actually, most have looked laughably bad. But striving for Oreo greatness created a reason for brands to be on social, with smart, hip, culturally relevant content as the ideal target to hit.

Living in Missouri, the utilization of social media has created a very different experience over the past 18 months. I live less than 15 minutes from #Ferguson, so the social rise of #BlackLivesMatter and the efforts of ConcernedStudent1950 (@CS_1950) from University of Missouri are very close to home. They've all played out for the world to see, and this is largely because of social media.

For years, Twitter's conversation on the Arab Spring felt distant - as things happening across the globe and beyond our daily lives tend to do - but the events of August 2015 changed everyone’s personal perspective. Complex issues were truncated to 140 characters and dangerously debated in Facebook posts. Suddenly, for better or worse, social media was driving the story.

Once again, this abrupt shift social’s functional objective calls everything we thought we knew about these communication platforms into question. And, if everything we once believed to be true about social media has been proven wrong, perhaps the target for brands is more complicated than fulfilling the role of that quick-witted guy in the corner with topical joke and wink.

When I began this column, I was actually on a plane - the date: November 13, 2015. Taking a break from emails, I fired up Hootsuite only to discover that the world had been rocked by the news from Paris. In the aftermath, brands have respectfully shown support and compassion for the lives lost, acknowledging the larger tragedy. These responses represent progress and show early steps toward becoming social brands of the world.

To all our friends in Paris, you’re in our hearts and our thoughts. -TH ❤️🇫🇷 #PrayforParis pic.twitter.com/7elzJMsHYN

— Tommy Hilfiger (@TommyHilfiger) November 14, 2015

If you're in Paris in need of emergency accommodation, our hosts have opened their doors https://t.co/E3TUbqD8m2

— Airbnb (@Airbnb) November 14, 2015

So, did we have the role of brands on social all wrong? Now the answer seems obvious.

As brands seek to play a role in people’s lives, they cannot simply be there to add a funny quip or a solution to a simple problem. Just as scholars realized the world was not flat, this realization opens up a host of “Now what?” moments, posing a plethora of new questions: How can we do that? Who do we empower to do that on our behalf? And, to twist a famed Facebook mantra, are we ready to "fail fast" when the stakes are higher than ever before?

If the social media world is round, fully-formed, and connected, then brands have an opportunity to be both citizens and partners on the voyage ahead, thus creating a better place for all.

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Why Social Media Marketing Is Not A 9-5 Job

As Social Media Marketing goes mainstream, companies finally understand the value of a Social Media presence to their bottom line. Chief Marketing Officers, steeped in traditional marketing philosophies, have been forced to reckon with this new type of marketing.  Many are now on the hunt for Social Media Marketing professionals.

The problem is that many are still mired in the old marketing paradigm.  They want to hire an employee to sit in a cubicle from 9-5 and “do” Social Media marketing. They are trying to fit a round peg into a square hole.

Social Media Marketing is not a 9-5 job – and is not strictly “marketing.”  It involves monitoring social sites – sometimes at odd hours.  It means being ready to find answers to questions when people are asking them.  It means being on the sites when the audience is there.  (90% of our clients’ Facebook pages are most active at 8:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m.)

While large corporations may have the luxury of staffing their Social Media Marketing departments 24/7, smaller companies do not. Having a dedicated professional available outside normal business hours – one that may not sit in the local office during the day – may be the answer.

Today’s dedicated Social Media Marketing professional is tuned into international, national, business and industry news.  Her day often starts well before 9:00 a.m.  She has the alerts set on her mobile phone to let her know when something important is happening – and can tweet or update the timeline quickly.  A Social Media professional may be at the supermarket or the gym when notifications, questions or complaints come in. Her value is in monitoring the social sites through the day and responding quickly – not sitting in an office – and the value of an employee like this should not be underestimated.

Today, more than ever, customers are not purchasing products during regular business hours.  They are shopping online while they watch Netflix in the evening.  They may have a question or a comment.  If they can’t get an answer from one company, the chances they will continue their search at another company.  And when they are unhappy, they do not want to wait until 9:00 the next day for someone to at least acknowledge their pain.

Consider a recent British Airways exchange, a large company with no Social staff around the clock – #fail.  (Read about it here Angry Customer Used Promoted Tweets to Chastise British Airways )

Hiring Managers need to figure out that a Social Media Marketer should be working hours that fit the needs of the Social Accounts, not the traditional business hours.  Understanding this and accepting it will benefit the business’ Social reputation – and their bottom line.

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What Brands Can Learn from Customer Conversations on Social Media

Consumer conversations surprise brands in a lot of ways. Customers often care more about some things than a brand realizes and less about what the brand thinks is important. This can affect social media, marketing and even product decisions.

In recent years, General Mills learned through customer conversations that families were playing with the Pillsbury dough, making shapes and designs for fun; not just cooking with it. Based on this insight, General Mills revitalized a tired brand by focusing on the family activity value the product enables.

Learning more about your customers from social and impacting your business is not new. Several years ago, Sun Microsystems discovered software developers were not talking about the category of tools they, IBM, and Microsoft were developing. Rather they were talking about a set of tools nobody was advancing. With this insight, Sun changed its strategy, re-allocated its budgets to the tools developers were interested in, and leaped ahead of their competition.

Customer conversations can also reveal that the message the brand intends to transmit via its marketing is not the message being heard. Either the marketing needs to be improved, the target audience changed, or a fundamental product change is needed. Conversations can also reveal customer support issues. In some cases, customers will solve each other’s problems through those conversations.

Social data from conversations outside your brand — say product category or target audience level — reveal insights about what consumers care about and why. This can inform your product development, business strategy, messaging and positioning, and inform the tactics you pursue to win customers.

Social data from customer conversations can provide brand, product, and consumer insights that you can apply to everyday marketing decisions. Social provides a rich, real-time, rejuvenated data source that brands are using to make smarter decisions.

Then there is the business benefit of higher customer satisfaction with lower costs by managing customer support issues in social media. Your customers are already there, trying to talk to you and trying to find resolution. Increasingly, the category leaders will be the companies who create positive customer experiences on both the pre and post sales side.

Phone support costs anywhere from $10 per inquiry (offshore and fully costed) to $23 per inquiry (US average for typical consumer products) to over $100 per inquiry (Cable TV), with Email and chat typically running $5-$10/inquiry. Customer support via social media discussions (a discussion thread on Facebook or a community web site discussion board) can be as little as $2/inquiry if a support agent is involved, or $0 marginal cost when the customers answer each other’s questions, which they like to do.

Social media empowers your customers to help each other, which is a rewarding experience for them and builds a knowledge base for the brand. Generally, your customers as a whole know more about the products than the brand does. In social, we say, “Nobody is as clever as everybody.”

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8 Social Media Tricks to Make People Crave Your Products

Are you wondering how to make a real impact on social media? Social media is a great way of selling your products or services, especially if you know how to get people engaged and excited. It takes a lot of hard work, but the results are spectacular if you go about it the right way. The good news is that it isn’t rocket science – there are lots of social media tricks that make people really want to buy from you. Here are eight of the best to get you started.

Use Great Graphics

Most people think visually – they respond much better to pictures than they do to words. If your product looks great, then show it off with bright, high-quality photos and even videos. Make sure that your images are interesting – don’t just use boring product shots. Instead, use images of people using your products. For example, if you’re selling lifejackets, show high-energy shots of the world’s greatest white-water rafting locations. You can even try a little visual humor. Even if your product isn’t something you can photograph, you can still generate lots of visual interest by using infographics – for instance, come up with some fascinating facts and then use a site such as Easel.ly to build an infographic around these.

Build Excitement Early

If you’re going to launch a new product online, don’t wait until the last minute to start building excitement. Instead, start talking about your product on social media long before you’re ready to take orders. Create buzz by releasing teaser videos, set up waiting lists, give people a behind-the-scenes look as you develop your product – there are lots of ways to build anticipation. Don’t give away all your secrets, though – people love a mystery and will keep coming back to find out more. If you do this, you’ll have them lining up to buy your product when you do launch.

Create Relationships

It’s called social media for a reason. One of the fastest ways to annoy people on social media is to start out with a hard product pitch. With social media, selling comes later. Start out by building relationships with your audience, so that you get positive engagement. Give them useful information, help them solve problems, entertain them – but don’t start selling until they’re ready. Once you see that you have a social media following that’s actively interested in your products, this is the time to start to promote. But don’t just switch from relationship building to an outright sales campaign – think about how you can leverage your relationship and keep your audience onside.

Get Bloggers to Review Your Products

Ask yourself this. When you buy something, who do you trust for recommendations? If you’re like most people, you ask family or friends what they think. It’s similar on social media – people pay attention to what bloggers say. This is because bloggers are independent and don’t have a vested interest in selling your product. Not only that, good bloggers have a huge following, so they give you a ready-made audience. You can reach out to bloggers yourself or, to make the process simple, you can connect with bloggers on sites such as Tomoson.  

Get A Little Crazy

On social media, people want to be entertained, not bored. Don’t be afraid to get inventive, even a little insane. Don’t offend anyone – but it’s okay to be a bit nutty. This doesn’t work for everything – for instance, stay serious if you’re selling security systems – but more times than not you’ll generate much more engagement if you do something truly memorable. If you’re selling pizzas, for example, run a social media campaign that shows how pizzas have inspired great people throughout history – such as Galileo dropping a cannonball and a pizza off the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Or, was it the Leaning Tower of Pizza? The possibilities are endless – just use your imagination.

Special Offers

One of the great tricks of selling on social media is to make people feel special. You’ll build real loyalty if you give exclusive offers that people can only get when they follow you online. Try giving away limited-time discount coupons available only on your social media channels, or run contests where people get a free entry for sharing their ideas and stories. Just make sure that your offers are truly exclusive, not something you offer to everyone.

Share Customer Reviews

We’ve already talked about getting bloggers to review your product. But some of the most powerful reviews come from customers themselves – after all, they’ve actually bought the product and used it. Customers love when they can give their feedback, and will often write much more personal reviews that resonate with other potential buyers. If you share customer reviews on your social channels – for example, tweet out links or send Facebook updates – then you’ll encourage other customers to review your product as well. Don’t worry if you get some negative customer reviews – everyone does. As long as the majority are positive, you’ll still see huge benefits.

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How to Offer Great Customer Service With Social Media

Have you experienced complaining via social media? Was it addressed promptly or were you seen-zoned? Honestly, I have and it was an unpleasant experience. I guess, I am one of those people, who were included in HelpScout.net’s statistics, which shows that 78% of customers have bailed out of a transaction due to poor customer service.

If you are a business owner, you can turn this negative into a positive remark. How? By offering great customer service. However, offering it through social media is difficult. First, it’s all online and there’s no personal touch. Second, people are used to talking to a live person.
But nowadays, companies use social media as an absolute channel to gain more customers and solicit customer experiences. Companies use customer insights to better their product and services.

So, if the majority of your customers are in social media, read this write-up to effectively use it for your advantage.

#1 Create a clear social media strategy

One of the major mistakes of startups (or even the old ones) is being overly excited when creating a social media strategy. As a result, the campaign doesn’t flourish. What you need to do is understand social media management to support your objectives and create a win-win relationship with your customers. You have to know where your customers are, so you can properly address them. If most of them are in Facebook, focus on that platform only. Your social media strategy must be relevant, clear, and concise. As I have mentioned, behind a successful business is an effective strategy.

#2 Think before you “speak”

It was Benjamin Franklin who said: “Think twice before you speak, and you will speak more wisely for it.” Apparently, this saying is hard to practice, especially if you get emotional. Although, there is an “edit” or “delete” option, you must think a million times before you post anything on social media. Professionalism must be practiced, as often as possible.

#3 Time is of the essence – Fix complaints, immediately

Following my no.2 option, negative comments are really scary. In fact, customers do remember the bad service more than anything else. However, you can prevent these – by solving their issues, immediately! Customer service is critical, especially, if the client is not happy at all. Action it with care, go an extra mile, and fix it as soon as possible.

If I may suggest, add a personal touch in solving complaints. If you think the conversation would stir up the moment, take it “offline,” send a private message instead or call if necessary. Remember, the faster you solve the complaints, the happier your customers are.

#4 Consider outsourcing your customer service

Depending how big the company is, customer service outsourcing could be a great alternative. Essentially, these companies offer well-trained workers that have impeccable customer service skills. They also follow a strict set of metrics to maintain the high-quality standards of customer service. If you are passionate about customer service, customer service outsourcing is a great investment for you.

#5 Always ask for feedback

Your customers’ feedback is an integral part of your business. This is your determining factor for how significant your product/service is to their needs. Customers give us feedback, like leaving a tip to a server. Feedback is another way for customers to insure promptness.

Customer service handling through social media is challenging. You don’t see the person’s face or reaction. The tone of your message can come across rude when it isn’t your intention at all. That’s why, create a social media plan and listen carefully to your customers.

Bear in mind, offering a great customer service isn’t costly, but an awesome sales opportunity.

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The Art of Making Customers Happy on Social Media

If you sell something online or if you run a business with an online presence—even if you’re just having a good time growing your personal brand—you’ll have the honor and the privilege of chatting directly with customers. 24 hours a day. 7 days a week.

This always-on mentality is an amazing privilege, and at the same time it can provide some challenges for small businesses. How can you best respond when conversations are happening constantly? And what if they’re not all positive?

How do you manage to make customers happy on social media?

I discovered a few tips that might help out here, some strategies and insights that are backed by a fair bit of research. There’s an art to making customers happy on social media, and the good news: There’s also a recipe.

Here’s what’s involved.

The 5-part recipe for making customers happy on social media

These are the five parts I’ve encountered in my research on customer happiness. It’s interesting to note also that the order here is somewhat important: Listen before you respond, for instance.

1. Listen carefully

2. Respond quickly

3. Make a connection

4. Be specific

5. Say their name

1. Listen carefully

You focus on listening rather than responding

Among the 10 Buffer values, seldom is there crossover between the specific phrasing of a value and the naming of a social media marketing strategy. We’re grateful for the overlap with listening.

Social listening is the process of finding the meaningful conversations and insights from all your mentions on social media.

In particular, these elements from our Buffer value seem to really resonate when it comes to successful social listening.

You seek first to understand, then to be understood

You focus on listening rather than responding

I really love the way that Lolly Daskall outlines the importance of listening as it relates to business and leadership. I think her description rings true for social media as well.

We listen to learn.

We listen to stay informed.

We listen to understand.

We listen to gain information.

We listen to acquire knowledge.

We listen to obtain wisdom.

Listening carefully comes in a couple of phases:

1. Finding the conversations
2. Pausing to listen to what’s being said

In terms of finding the conversations, there was some really neat research done by Mention, who analyzed over one billion brand mentions tracked through their tool.

They found that 92 percent of people talking to brands have fewer than 500 followers. So you should listen for more than just big influencers.

They also saw that 30 percent of tweets containing company names don’t use the company’s twitter handle. So you should listen for multiple keywords and variations beyond just your username.

What this might look like in practice

There are a number of useful tools you can put together into a social listening dashboard.

Mention is one of our favorites, as it’s able to track just about any variation of you or your brand name, as well as keywords, phrases, and hashtags. One cool tip is to sync up Mention with Feedly to build a listening dashboard, alongside your RSS consumption.

Additionally, you can dive quite deep into Twitter using Twitter’s built-inAdvanced Search. You can drill down into specific accounts or hashtags or keywords, including going way back into the archives if needed.

What happens if you don’t

When conversations happen about your brand on social media, you have the chance to get involved and make a positive impression on those talking about you.

If you miss those opportunities, you miss the chance to make an impression. You miss the chance to provide answers or solutions or to steer the conversation in a meaningful direction.

And to go a step further, people might not think you listen or care. Brands that never respond not only fail to make a positive impression, they can sometimes make a poor one with their silence.

2. Respond quickly

Customers expect a response on Twitter within 60 minutes

Twitter is perhaps the most real-time of the major social networks, with the half-life ot tweets measured in minutes.

Consumers expect this rapidity to extend to their conversations with you, too.

Research by Lithium Technologies found that 53 percent of users who tweet at a brand expect a response within the hour. The percentage increases to 72 percent for those with a complaint. 

If you can pull of this quick feat (tips on this are below), you’ll go a long ways toward setting yourself apart. Few companies are able to answer so speedily.

A study done by Simply Measured found that nearly all brands—99% of them—are on Twitter and 30% have a dedicated customer service handle. Still, the average response time was 5.1 hours with only 1 out of 10 companies answering within an hour.

What this might look like in practice

Monitoring and listening with the tools mentioned above will be a great start for replying fast.

Additionally, tools like Must Be Present can help you track your response time on Twitter, or you can invest in software like Spark Central to stay on top of your customer support tweets.

If you’ve got a big team of support heroes, then a third-party tool like Spark Central is a great route to go.

If it’s just you, then you might look into the notification settings for your social network. For instance, with Twitter, you can sign up for Twitter email alerts and customize them so that you only receive the messages that you’d like—for instance, @-replies or new follows.

What happens if you don’t

Mark Granovetter in the American Journal of Sociology presented his social network theory that visualizes people as nodes. Those who are connected through a relationship are a single link away, while distant relationships are only a few links away.

Granovetter’s theory came out in 1973, well before the advent of social media (or the modern Internet, even), yet it still applies directly to the power of networking on Twitter, Facebook, and the rest. As a follow-up to Granovetter’s theory, a trio of UK researchers observed that most people are no more than six links away from any other person.

Put another way, word of a poor Twitter experience can spread far and fast. 

Jeremy Waite found that a tweet can spread from one person to 2.7 million within four generations—which is great for the amazing content you produce and share, and good to keep in mind for the conversations you have as well.

3. Make a connection

From a high level view, this strategy comes down to your perspective with social media.

It’s an honor and a privilege for someone to reach out to you on social media, amid the millions of other profiles and accounts to connect with.

When someone chooses to chat with you, be grateful, and respond.

Zappos, well known for its awesome customer service over the phone and online, has the following response numbers:

• Response Time:  < 20 min
• Response Rate: 100 percent

Yes, they reply to everyone!

In the book Traction, Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares talk about 19 traction channels to help gain more customers. One of these channels is unconventional PR, which includes customer service.

You can be so great at customer service that it becomes free, unconventional PR for your brand!

Consider: The average top brands worldwide tweet at least 12 times a day, and 54 percent of these brands are sending less than one @-reply per day.

There’s a lot of room to improve (and stand out) amid those numbers.

What this might look like in practice

When possible, connect 24/7 with your audience.

When not possible—and totally understandable if you’re a small business or a one-person team—communicate your availability.

Zappos does the 24/7 thing in a cool way by having their Twitter support team say hello and good-bye as they change shifts.

American Express gives us a good example of how to communicate when you turn off for the night.

Another way to make a one-to-one connection or conversation is through Direct Message.

Our co-founder Leo wrote a great article on Social Media Examiner about Twitter and customer service, and he laid out this quick 3-step guide for what to do when you’re communicating with your many people in your audience about a similar topic or bug.

Send one public tweet explaining the situation. Anyone who finds your Twitter profile will see that tweet first.

Then, reply to any @mentions with a DM. First, you won’t clutter your business’s Twitter stream with @replies for other customers looking for what is going on. Second, you can go into more detail explaining how you can help each customer.

Switch back to sending @replies if there is no acute problem anymore, but only regular questions and support requests.

DMs are also extremely useful when a simple @reply doesn’t give all of the information the customer needs.

DMs are also a great alternative to the “please send an email to name@company.com” line. You make a connection with your customer without sending them elsewhere to talk to you and dragging out the process unnecessarily.

What happens if you don’t

Not only do you risk alienating your community by not responding, you can also create harmful reactions to your brand. A research study in the Academy of Management found that companies who accepted responsibility for a problem saw favorable responses. Those who were slow in responding to complaints did not. It’s all a quite intuitive conclusion, though interesting to see backed by research in addition to intuition.

4. Be specific

This strategy is one borrowed from email marketing, where specificity—often seen in the form of segmentation and personalization—is a key driver of higher open rates and clickthrough rates.

A study by Jupiter Research found that relevant emails drove 18 times more revenue than general, broadcast emails.

Shane Snow and Jon YouShaei tested specificity in a series of cold emails, changing things like the subject line and the thank you message to see what worked best. Of the cold emails, sent in impersonal batches, only 1.7% of people replies, 12 out of 700.

Following the study, Shane cold emailed a single contact with a highly personalized email. He got a reply.

Here’s the email Shane sent:

Subject: Shook your hand at NextJump, would love your advice

Adam,

Fantastic presentation at NextJump yesterday! I was thrilled to shake your hand and say “thanks” right before you ran out. I was also happy to see your book hit the Print+Ebook bestseller list in the Times Book Review last week. The world needs this message.

I feel apprehensive asking you this, since I know you have plenty of opportunities to give already, but I wanted to know if, when the frenzy dissipates, you would be willing to coach me a bit on the work I’m doing for my first book? I just signed an exciting deal with HarperCollins (my editor, Hollis Heimbouch, works with Clayton Christensen and Jim Collins) for a book that I’m hoping will help a LOT of people. (It’s inspired, in fact, by XXXpersonal storyXXX.)

I’d love to tell you more about the book, which is provisionally titled Smartcuts, and pick your brain for one of my chapters. But most of all, I’d be delighted to get your advice on managing the whole process as well as you have. Perhaps we can grab a few minutes at your office or here in New York sometime?

Best wishes,

Shane

What this might look like in practice

Replying with specificity to your customers is a wonderfully smart and simple habit to get into. All it takes is a bit of notice.

When someone mentions you on Twitter, you can click on their username to see a popover with their bio and information.

What you might get from here:

• Location – “Hope the weather’s great in Boston!”
• Website – “Love the design on your site. :)”
• Favorite teams – “How’re the Red Sox doing?”
• School or alma mater – “Go ‘Cats!”
• Interests/passions – (attach a picture or gif)
• Work – “Hope all’s going great at CompanyX!”

From the above bio of Todd’s, I can tell with just a bit of Google searching and Twitter clicking that he’s based in Boston, he does content for a consulting company, he teaches at Bryant University (“Go Bulldogs!”), and he loves running and dogs.

What happens if you don’t

There aren’t too many downsides to an impersonal Twitter response. A response, any response, is better than none.

Personalization is what can help take your conversations from everyday to extraordinary. If you aim to delight your customers at every turn, then personalization in your social media replies is a great route to consider.

5. Say their name

“Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.” ~ Dale Carnegie

A Ball State study found that addressing customers by their real name is considered a best practice of brands on social media.

And certainly, the psychology backs it up.

“You” or your name is considered to be one of the five most persuasive words in the English language.

Some of the biggest brands in the world rely on this personal touch with their interaction. In the book High-Tech, High-Touch Customer Service, Micah Solomon shares an acronym used by Apple to help inform its customer conversations.

Apple takes the overall goal to … “Present a solution for the customer to take home today.” 

And they seek to achieve this with the following acronym:

A – Approach customers with a personalized, warm welcome

P – Probe politely to understand all the customer’s needs

P – Present a solution for the customer to take home today

L – Listen for and resolve any issues or concerns

E – End with a fond farewell and an invitation to return

What this might look like in practice

In most cases, the customer’s first name will be easy enough to find on their profile. Twitter bios, for instance, allow for a username (the @-handle the person chooses) and for a first and last name.

Take a quick peek at the name before replying, and you can easily add it in to your tweet or comment.

What happens if you don’t

Like personalized messages, adding someone’s name is neither a deal-maker nor a deal-breaker. It’s just another nice touch. And all these nice touches could very well add up to something quite meaningful over time.

Over to you

What strategies have you found most helpful in replying to people on social media?

I’d love to learn any of your tips on the subject. Feel free to leave any thoughts at all here in the comments!

Image sources: UnSplash, Pablo, IconFinder, Mention

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