Building A Successful Social Media Customer Service Team

More and more people are turning to social media to voice their concerns and questions, to interact with the brands they use on a regular basis. Therefore, brands should count with a social media customer service team as a essential piece of your customer experience strategy. It involve collaboration between marketing and customer service teams. That collaboration will allow you to build a model that enhanced the company’s ability to respond quickly and effectively.

Building a successful social media customer service team

The social media customer team , need to be tech-savvy with strong writing skills.

Because these individuals are essentially bridging the gap between customer service and the marketing team, they need to have a clear understanding of both.

It also requires them to be passionate about serving customers and empowered to make a difference via these brief yet powerful interactions.

Consistent delivery is key, as they are walking a fine line between personal interaction and efficient issue resolution, all within a very public realm.

The agents for social media customer support should be personable and perceptive with strong technical capabilities and excellent judgment for risk mitigation. they need to be well versed in your brand’s vision and marketing goals.

When you’re deciding to work with an outsourced contact center partner, choose a provider that cares about assimilating their team of agents into your brand and culture.

The Strategy

Building brand loyalty and customer retention through social media requires a delicate balance of personable authenticity and process-focused resolution. Official responses to complaints and comments need to be solution-oriented, without getting defensive.

If your brand is inundated with consumer tweets, analyze and prioritize social engagement. It’s best to tackle the direct mentions or messages to your brand first. Then establish the parameters for prioritization, for example for when you are interacting with a high ranking influencer. Consider the risks and rewards of those interactions. A public conversation with a major influencer can mean your audience reaches a wide audience with one post. That can work to your advantage in high volume situations like a service disruption.

Additionally, make sure agents are well trained in when and how to adeptly and tactfully move conversations from the public realm to private direct messaging. Risk mitigation is key – basically, your agents need to be able to assess sentiment, determine how broad the audience is, and how best to collaborate with the consumer to find a resolution before they can begin the process of resolving the issue.

If an issued is moved from public to private, it can be extremely valuable to close the loop in public so the audience to the conversation understand a resolution has been reached. For example, on Twitter, posting a closing tweet like “Thanks for connecting through DM. Glad we were able to make things right for you!” lets anyone following the original conversation know that you didn’t just drop the ball or ignore the problem.

Another strategy to consider is creating content to answer common questions more effectively. This is where a strong bridge between the contact center team and the marketing team is key. Linking to a blog post, white paper, or how-to article in response to a customer’s problem creates an efficient resolution while also providing valuable information that can serve to increase customer loyalty and even customer conversion.

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