Social services
Online reputation is becoming one of the biggest expenditures for businesses across the globe – your reputation is your web presence that is made up of websites, directories and review sites, advertising and, of course, social media profiles. For most businesses their investment in online reputation is typically focused on acquisition of new clients and, while this isn’t a bad thing, businesses and agencies need to remember the importance of customer support, especially on social media.
CUSTOMER SERVICES PRE-SOCIAL
All but a few years ago, pre-social media, if we didn’t like the service or a product that we had been provided with we would just moan and grumble to everyone we knew. That created fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) to potential buyers, resulting in lost sales for the service provider/manufacturer. We may have even attempted to contact the support department of a business, on a premium rate number, or an email address, which was more like the black hole of Calcutta – leading to further frustration, upset, and sometimes anger. To rebuild the relationship with the angry customer would often take a lot of hand holding and, ultimately, not impact the view of the complainer’s peers. In order to rebuild those damaged prospective buyers’ opinions from the FUD, marketing teams would have to work twice as hard to convince those potential buyers, that in fact the service or product was actually a worthwhile purchase. Ultimately meaning the brands cost per acquisition was much higher.
SOCIAL CUSTOMER SERVICES
Enter social media. At first marketers hopped onto this new instant communication but were overwhelmed by just how quickly they started to generate conversation. But, not all of it was “We love you”, “Your products are great” etc. In fact a high portion were complaints. Marketers hit a state of panic not really knowing how to deal with such communication and, in some cases, support tweets and posts were left unanswered. So lets talk about our “pre-social” scenario in the modern day social customer service sphere. Today if we have a complaint we now turn to social media, mainly Twitter because the network is public and we know that we’ll get a near-on instant response as someone is sitting at the other side waiting for complaints. But the trouble is, we’ve got no insight into what is happening on closed networks such as Facebook where privacy settings don’t allow us to engage.
LISTEN, LISTEN, LISTEN, AND THEN RESPOND
On a final note, when it comes to social, think of it as a conversation – you wouldn’t just shout over a complaining customer, so let them vent, and then respond with a resolution. If the solution is complex, try and take it “offline” i.e. out of the public sphere and to email or direct message (DM). Also consider how many other customers the complaint could affect, and how you can handle those too. You’d be amazed how many times one complaint spirals into dozens.
