Customer support reps know that social media has, by its nature, improved and made the role of the customer support much more manageable. This is because they no longer rely entirely on a helpdesk to communicate with the customer as was before.
Also, they can communicate with the customers in real-time and without deploying lots of resources. That is why support reps find social media valuable in engaging with the customer and among themselves.
But customer support team do not solely use social media for forming marriages with the customer. There are other ways social media helps support teams besides saving them lots of time.
In this article, we will discuss five ways social media can help your support teams put their valuable time to better use.
Five Ways Social Media Save Time For Customer Support Teams
1. Social Media Is An Excellent Place To Drive Product Adoption
For many support reps, launching a new feature or product is always exciting. You cannot wait to hear all the views customers have or want to say about the product.
However, sending out a new feature or product has its downside because of the many questions customers ask.
Support teams soon find themselves overwhelmed with being the point of contact, which, without proper intervention, may cause churn.
To save support teams time and reduce churn, use social media to drive product/feature adoption.
How?
Eyewear maker Warby Parker used to run a YouTube handle, WarbyParkerhelp, where support reps and other employees would use videos to extinguish questions from customers about their product.
The video made it easier for support reps to answer questions that needed walkthroughs with the customer or answers exceeding 140 characters.
That includes explaining to customers struggling with the new variants, how to change a frame, clean the lenses, details on shipping, and other prescriptions.
Or show customers the resources that will assist them in making better use of the product.
With such interactions, customers would find solutions to their problems by themselves, without further help from the support reps. This helps improves customer experience and excellent value addition to your team and the customer.
The extra time earned your team can use for essential matters send via the helpdesk channel.
2. Gives You Time To Tackle Complex Issues
By now, you already know social media compliment customer service in every way. One of those ways is tackling issues. Whether you are using social media or your channel for customer support, you know there are different issues that customers present.
Some may be less complicated than the others. While you may tackle these issues via social media, it only helps to sort simple problems.
This gives you time to sort out complicated customer issues sent via your ticket channel. Or better yet, directing complicated matters that come via social media to your support channel.
Apple does this nicely through its Twitter handle @Apple Support.
A great platform where their support reps can respond to simple customer queries which need not pass through the standard support channel.
Support agents can also share with the customers the new features coming and how to prevent things like phone attacks. They can also direct customers with complex technical issues to the right channel for quick help.
With this workaround, you will reduce the communication barrier, increase trust with your customers, and, besides, gauge your support team’s performance.
This saves lots of time as you will separate the complex problems from straightforward issues and use the correct channel to deal with each case. It helps you prioritize what matters most in your support channel and can direct relevant matters to the right people and avoid making your team look like a revolving door when dealing with the customer.
3. Identify Where Most of Your Customers Come From or Located
SaaS and Internet firms operating globally use a lot of resources in identifying their customer’s locations. That includes bots and other software that can track and locate the user’s location or even city.
This increases operational costs and may even harm your user experience and conversion rates.
Thankfully, you can mitigate such unnecessary costs and overhead by connecting with your customers on social media.
You can form groups on Facebook or create a support handle on Twitter and engage with your customers. Afterwhich, you can find the locale of most of your customers from the social analytics or activity log.
To succeed, you first need to optimize your social media pages, be it Twitter or Facebook. Then under the audience/user information/page insights on these platforms, click on profiles/peoples tab and then followers section to get stats on your visitor’s demographics, age and other nuance.
You can also filter your search for different methods: mobile footprints or lifestyle. You will get intelligence on how users are viewing you, what browsers they are using, and their countries and cities.
Social media analytics dashboard has a whale of resources to use, improve user experience, benchmark, and more, that save you not only on cost but also time.
4. Authenticate Users
I have talked about using social media analytics to locate users and to perform other myriads of functions — one of which is to authenticate users. But why do you need to authenticate users?
The rise of AI and algorithms gave birth to bots people use to perform different tasks. Such software may bring more risk to your product or service as they aim to collect additional info on your product.
To mitigate such risks, you can encourage your customers to connect with you on social media through groups or a dedicated handle. Or use the two-factor authentication to communicate with the app or service.
From there, you can use the analytics feature to distinguish real users from bots.
It’s even more comfortable if you are a B2B firm since the firm’s you engage with will have a badge authenticating them as the real users.
By connecting your messaging apps to help desk software, agents can fulfill other tasks such as finding users’ locations, collecting relevant feedback, reducing entry barriers, and improve user experience.
5. Designing Feedback
Let’s be honest. Can you remember when you completed a feedback form? How was the experience? Did you like it? I am sure you didn’t. And I am also sure anytime you saw those forms sent your way, you either ignored or sent them into spam, right?
Yes! As a customer, I dislike feedback forms and many other customers, too. Studies show that over 80% of your customers will not complete a feedback form, yet, there are lots of resources and time support teams allocated to create these forms. Besides also showing the customers how to fill these forms and learning how to create them yet, this time could be put into better use.
So how can support teams save time and resources when it comes to matters feedback? The answer lies in social media.
Most customers today would rather share their experience on your product on social media, than with you, making social media an excellent platform for feedback.
With a tool like Hashtagify, you can create, search, and find hashtags like #feedback or #customerresponse and #customerexperience to see responses from your customers and even those of the competitor.
They can also do social listening using a tool like Aworia to collect those hard to get input crowded in all the social noise.
And where they find “aha moment,” support teams can turn them into high-converting UGC for their customer care messages and social media marketing activities.
Use Social Media to Save Time for Your Support Team
Social media is already an essential ingredient in customer support. We see it removes friction in the support system, making it easier for support reps to be more efficient in the delivery of their service.
Efficient delivery of service means lots of time is preserved for more meaningful and crucial matters hence improving the overall service delivery to every customer.
Author Bio
Derick Okech is an ex-CRM Ambassador who loves looking for opportunities wherever he goes. This includes switching between writing and SMM. In his free time, he builds programs using Python, seeks divine inspiration, and watches Manchester United topple rivals. Follow him here: LinkedIn | Carthall.
