How To Use Social Media As An Effective Customer Service Centre.

The importance of social media asides just chatting with friends & family, posting photos, uploading videos, status updates, and more, can never be overemphasized. Over the years, social media platforms have rightly been used by many organisations and individuals as a marketing tool, and as such, using it as a customer service centre can effectively grow your brand or business exponentially.

If you are going to use your company’s social media presence as a customer service centre, you need to run the accounts effectively. This is because if your online presence is poor or badly curated, it could create doubts about your brand and sway prospective customers to the nearest competitor.

In essence, if your social media platforms are well managed, it would enhance your brand’s reputation and grow your company’s online influence, and possible virality through its clear, friendly, understanding, outstanding, hilarious and notable online voice.

That said, here’s how to use social media as an effective customer service centre:

See Also: 5 Highly Effective Ways To Sell More Products Online With Social Media

1). Create Authentic Customer Relationships:

To quickly reach and meet your customers’ needs and wants, using social media platforms as a customer service centre isn’t a bad idea. And to achieve this, you should be able to create an authentic relationship with your customers and target audience online.

Since a majority of businesses only see social media platforms as a self-promotion centre, they largely don’t usually respond to their audience’s comments or tweets. You, on the other hand, should use your own business’ Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn accounts to establish a real, cordial, personal relationship with your audience by engaging in meaningful conversations and always tending to their needs in record time.

2). Use The Right Hashtags:

While hashtags are often used to make contents or posts easy to find on social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn, you should do the same by using hashtags specific to your industry and consumers and also add meaningful and much-anticipated information in the body of the post for your audience.

It is key to always adopt specific and trending content hashtags, especially during festive periods, certain holidays, or when a hot topic is trending. Doing this will assist prospects searching for information on this to find your brand on their respective social networks.

See Also: 5 Ways Social Media Can Help You Gain More Customers

3). Build A Loyal Customer Bedrock:

What do most people do when you have a bad experience with any firm or organization? They complain, rant, and very likely leave a negative review or feedback about their experience online or in-person to other people to ensure they don’t fall victim to the same terrible product or service delivery. 

When customers are angry, they vent a lot on social media, and one way to help your company out of this situation is to consistently provide incredible products and services while maintaining a great customer service experience on social media so that when disgruntled clients vent on social media for reasons true or not, your existing loyal customer base would very likely defend your brand.

4). Be Responsive:

Using social media platforms as a customer service centre requires you to be responsive. People love to be heard and acknowledged even if they made a bad or angry comment. So if you are responding to any customer complaint, endeavour to listen closely and let he or she know and understand that you are actually listening and would do something about it.

If you don’t show enthusiasm to the disgruntled customer, it would reflect badly on your brand because when you reply to a customer online, prospects will see it, and if you don’t, prospects will also know that you didn’t.

This is why it is important for you to address the concerns of disgruntled customers on social media so that they don’t just leave satisfied to an extent with your product or services, but prospective consumers researching your company can know you are trustworthy to always tend to their needs.

A warm response with a smile, a post like, a thank you message, or a love emoji would go a long way in showing that you truly care.

See Also: 7 Reasons Every Small Business Should Hire A Social Media Manager

5). Be Active:

Since your priority is to make social media platforms a customer service centre for your business, your online activity must be felt every day by new, existing, and prospective clients.

Most brands that fail in their efforts to use social media as a customer service centre is almost always largely as a result of their inactivity and non-engagement with their customers.

If you, however, want to render an effective customer service using social media platforms, staying active and engaging with your audience would prove successful on the long-run.

About The Writer

This is a guest blog post submitted by Ikoi Abode Ikenna. He is a Pharmacist living in Lagos, Nigeria. A fan of entrepreneurship, technology, web development, and blogging. He currently owns West Entrepreneur Forum. You can follow him on Instagram @pharmabode and Facebook @ikoi abode Ikenna.

Note: This article has been edited for style and substance.

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