How to deliver excellent customer experiences on social media

“Be where your customers are” is perhaps the first rule of customer experience.

And where are customers? On social media.

Indeed, the average Facebook user will scroll through the height of The Statue of Liberty in one day.

Yet, nowadays, it is not only Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to consider. Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat have also become mainstream customer engagement channels.

By harnessing these platforms, organizations can build brand awareness, commercialize social media, and manage their reputation.

Moreover, a thought-provoking flyer from Content Guru suggests that companies can harness social media to:

Complete omnichannel engagement strategies
Provide rapid, real-time responses
Enable personalised, proactive service
Reduce inbound contacts through automation

However, many shy away from creating ambitious social customer experiences. Why? Because there are several daunting challenges to think through first.

The Challenges of Delivering CX on Social Media

Managing the pool of information about a brand, its products, and services is a hefty task.

It is not only conventional social media channels to consider. With blogs, forums, and third-party review sites, consumers have many avenues to spread the word about their experiences. That includes the brands they like and – perhaps more pressingly – the brands they don’t like.

Frankly, the crux of the immediate challenge faced by many organizations is just keeping up.

In addition, with the introduction of each new social media channel, the landscape changes – often dramatically.

As such, controlling the conversation around an issue or event is a considerable challenge. Multiply that, in today’s world, by a lot of events.

Finally, many organizations must ready themselves to meet soaring consumer expectations – especially regarding speed of answer.

Consider the following statistics: on Facebook, 85 percent of consumers expect a reply in six hours or less. On Twitter, 64 percent want an answer in one hour. Yet, according to Frost & Sullivan, the average business takes over a day to reply, indicating the magnitude of the challenge.

Indeed, there are multiple twists in the tail for businesses attempting to deliver excellent social customer experiences.

Luckily, with a forward-thinking approach, everything becomes much less daunting.

How to Deliver Excellent Social CX

To combat the challenges above, brands often formalize processes that structure how their contact centre organizes, distributes, and analyses the information it collects across its engagement channels.

However, before they reach this stage, it is best for organizations to assess the following set of questions:

What are our goals?
How will we use social media to interact with customers?
How do other organizations in our sector handle social media interactions?
What is our bandwidth to handle care-related social queries?
How much of the potential workload can we automate?
What is our budget for technology?

Another critical consideration is to create a brand voice that stands out and aligns its content. Creating a brand personality for employees to emulate is a potential tactic here.

Such a personality may differ from one engagement channel to another. Nevertheless, organizations can train agents on their brand personality, and when to lean into particular aspects of it.

The goal is to be fun with it but fall back on the fundamentals of customer service – acknowledgement, empathy, and reassurance – when the customer is upset, or the matter is of a serious nature.

Of course, this is simple for humans but traditionally tricky for bots, which is why many organizations have resisted turning to the technology, wishing to appear more authentic.

However, social engagement technology is advancing quickly. As the aforementioned Content Guru flyer states: NLP-powered chatbots can offer automated responses to messages containing certain keywords. These intelligent chatbots can also use machine learning to adapt their responses to fit a given situation.

Therefore, bots provide food for thought. Yet, first and foremost organizations must set goals. These allow organizations to design a process to meet and exceed baseline objectives while delivering a KPI strategy.

Critical Technology Considerations

Technology is the cornerstone of social media workflows, allowing organizations to capture data, prioritize mentions, and develop an escalation process.

Ideally, a single suite will suffice, harnessing AI to filter and tag contacts across various social channels. It may then determine their importance – perhaps through sentiment categorization – and deliver the contacts to the right teams – whether customer care, PR, or sales. Along the way, the technology will also track mission-critical KPIs.

While many workflows will leverage AI to filter, funnel, and set alerts for trending topics and urgent mentions, it is also helpful for automation and data collection.

Moreover, the technology may remove spam, deprioritize particular conversations, and mechanize fact-based responses. What is left filters through to customer care humans.

As such, brands get the most impactful mentions to the right people at the right time.

Source: CX TODAY