How to Use Social Media to Drive a Better Customer Experience

Social media isn’t just for marketing – it’s for listening, responding to customer queries, managing customer relationships, and otherwise improving the customer experience. Eric Meyerson, Head of Marketing at Sensai and a veteran of Facebook, offers a few key strategies.

Social media marketingOpens a new window is not just about finding more followers or making more sales, it’s about enhancing your customer experience! Even though organic engagement on Facebook has become a dead zone for marketersOpens a new window , brands big and small can still use social to build a better customer experience.

As the social media platforms have made sharing your own messages harder than ever (without paying for ads), they’ve made it easier to interact with your customers and hear what they have to say. With a few updates and adjustments to your social strategies, you’ll find a significant value for your business in using social to optimize your customer experience and increase loyalty and advocacy.

Here are a few key tips on how to think strategically about how to use social to support and enhance your overall customer experience:

Listen to your customers: Social media is full of people, opining and complaining and effusively praising and otherwise offering a live stream of consciousness on every possible topic of interest. Every day, your business has the opportunity to listen in on this public stream of consciousness and find out what people are saying about your brand, your products, your competitors.

Are you following the relevant conversations affecting your industry? Has a disgruntled customer turned your brand into a viral hashtag of negative feedback? Are customers singing your praises, and if so, can you give them a shout-out?

Even if you don’t spend a dime on sponsored posts or Facebook ads, it can still be useful to use Facebook or other social platforms as a listening tool to keep a finger on the pulse of public opinion. You might glean insights just from listening that can help you improve your customer experience – or head off the next public relations snafu.

Just create and save simple searches in Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Twitter is more likely to get you volume from regular customers, but Facebook and Instagram are better for seeing if anyone with a prominent public following is mentioning you.

Also Read: How to Ace Social Media Marketing with Limited ResourcesOpens a new window

Provide more responsive customer service: The days of customers calling a customer service 1-800 number or sending letters of a complaint via snail mail are mostly gone – consumers today expect to be able to reach you immediately with questions and issues. They will tweet at you, Facebook Message you, or DM you on Instagram.

Younger consumers, who typically don’t check email very often, will especially expect social messaging to be their primary medium for interaction with companies, brands, and artists. What this means is that you need your messaging channels to be inviting, and you should expect to monitor these channels continuously for service requests. Don’t let your social media messaging be an afterthought – just like a phone number or an email address, it’s a totally valid channel of communication.

Invite customers to message you or DM you (using the appropriate term for whatever platforms you’re discussing). Assign staff to respond to those social media messages, even if it’s a quick reply acknowledging the message and asking for more time to deliver a more complete response – customers love to hear from you quickly so they feel reassured.

First step: Turn on automatic replies with a specific promised Service Level Agreement (SLA), such as, “We’ll get back to you within 24 hours.” This matters because consumers today expect chat to be live, not asynchronous like email. If you cannot chat with them in an ongoing live conversation, try to manage their expectations for how soon they can expect to hear a more detailed response.

Also Read: Does Customer Service Improve Customer Experience?Opens a new window

Embrace the Rise of the Machines: Messenger Bots and Customer Service Bots are quickly being adopted and deployed by companies in all industries, from banks to insurance companies to fashion brands. It’s easier than ever to program a simple bot to engage with customers. Companies like ManyChat offer free tools to get you started – it’s astonishingly easy; you just have to connect your business Facebook Page to a service like ManyChat and you can start setting up your bot, with no coding skills required. And Facebook Messenger messages currently have open rates of 80% – try getting those results from email!

Find Your Customers: At SensaiOpens a new window , we’ve heard from lots of businesses that are struggling to make social media effective, and many are ready to quit because of the challenges of gaining traction. To provide better experience, your customers need to know that you’re available on social media. That means you should select the most effective social media channelsOpens a new window , and directly ask your customers to follow you on your most active channels. That way, when they have an issue or request, they’ll know to find you there.

Also Read: 5 Ways to Turn Social Media Interactions Into Actionable Sales LeadsOpens a new window

Social media has become more cluttered and competitive than ever before, but the good news is: it’s still all about people who want to connect and communicate and be heard! That means your company has an opportunity to use social media the right way – to improve your listening skills, engage with customers more responsively, and maximize the potential of automated tools like Messenger Bots to support your sales and service staff by taking the routine queries and mundane interactions with customers off of their plate.

Even if your company doesn’t spend money on social media marketing, you can still get great value by investing some time and attention on using social media to improve your customer experience.