December 17, 2020 
The impact social media can have on your brand’s customer service cannot be overemphasised. Many 21st-century businesses have realised this and are beginning to concentrate more on social media customer service.
However, only a few are using social media to its full strength, especially when it comes to improving customers’ experiences.
About 76% of people who message a business on social media do so for customer support while up to 95% expect replies within minutes.
There is a lot at stake, and in a time when all it takes to bring down a business is a single social media post from a disgruntled customer, your business must take social media usage seriously especially when it comes to customer service.
With the vastness of social media and the huge potentials in automation tools like chatbots, there is nothing your brand won’t be able to achieve in your customer service unit.
The 8 Ways Businesses Can Use Social Media For Customer Service
As stated above, one of the best ways you can use social media for customer service is by automating the process. For all the other ways, chatbots and other tools like auto commenter have a massive role to play.
Any business that has not yet automated their social media with chatbots like Zebrabuzz and the likes cannot be said to have a good social media customer support system. You will learn in the following ways how automating your social media customer services is integral to successful customer support.
Choose the Right Social Media Platforms
There are several social media platforms out there. However, as much as it is important to use social media for your customer service, it is equally important to choose the right one.
Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and so on have large audiences, which also means the possibility of finding your customers there are increased.
Facebook has over 2 billion active users, and Facebook Messenger has about 1.3 billion. This makes Facebook one of the best places to have a social media customer support account.
Suppose you are not sure the social media account your customers use, you can run a simple survey or have your automation tool like the Zebrabuzz chatbot collect data to show you their most preferred platforms.
Have a Dedicated Social Media Support Page
Besides choosing the right platform, one of the best ways to use social media for customer service is having a dedicated support page. You may have one generally for your business, but it is good practice to create a page only for customer support.
This makes it easier for your customers to send complaints and queries and also makes it easier for you to filter through requests.
Customer Engagement is Paramount
For a successful customer support system on social media, you must always engage and interact with your customers. Whether publicly or privately, their messages and comments must be replied to within minutes.
Always engaging your customers is good practice as you can develop a great relationship with them. Whether their comments or messages, you have to engage with all of them.
However, to be realistic, that can be difficult to do, especially if there are multiple customers to respond to. This is why you should automate your social media customer support.
With the Zebrabuzz AI chatbot set up on your social media page, it can engage your customers on Facebook Messenger, Instagram, your e-commerce website, via email, SMS, and many other communication channels.
There are also tools like Facebook auto commenter or autoresponder, which can help increase traffic on your page by automatically responding to and liking your customers’ comments and posts publicly, privately or both.
You will not need to increase employee head count, and for only a token, it can run without supervision while you focus on other things.
Be Available at all Times
Being available regularly is one of the many ways you can successfully use social media for customer service. Social media makes you easily accessible by your customers so they can contact you at any time, even in the night when you are asleep, and they will still expect an immediate response.
It is humanly impossible to be available 24/7 on social media. You may hire a new customer agent, but he or she is likely to burn out or get tired sooner or later. If you also decide to hire more agents to take shifts, you are unnecessary increasing employee headcount which can strain your budget.
With chatbots, you can be available 24/7 to engage your customers. Even while you sleep or do any other thing, you will remain available and accessible to all of your customers.
Speed
Customers expect replies within minutes of reaching you, at most an hour and at worst, a day. But you don’t want to take that long.
Patience may be a virtue, but not all of us have it – don’t expect your customers to either. The only way you can reply to customers speedily on social media is with a chatbot.
With Zebrabuzz, especially, you can set response time to as low as ‘0 Second’ which is immediate. This way, all customer-related issues will be sorted out quickly, which will keep your customers happy with your brand.
Be Polite, Apologetic and Straightforward
Another of the many ways to use social media for customer service is being polite and straightforward. Customers do not have time to read long texts. There is a reason why social media has short forms for sending messages.
Also, be apologetic even when you are wrong. Find out more information on how to respond to customers on social media here.
Answer FAQs
Also, have a dedicated tab for your Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) to filter the number of queries you receive. FAQs are like a self-service tab where customers can find solutions to their problems without having to reach out to you.
Gather all the questions you likely receive or you feel you will likely receive if you are a startup, and answer them in a tab.
Your Zebrabuzz chatbot can also do that for you – answer FAQs. Once you have gathered all your questions and answered them in your bot replies, whenever a customer messages you and asks a question in tandem with any of those questions, they will receive an immediate response.
Personalise your Services
One of the many ways to use social media for effective customer service is by personalising the experience of your customers.
By personalising the experience of your customers, especially with chatbots, you will be able to offer product recommendations via customer emails, Messenger chat and so on.
You will also make each customer feel like the only customer you have with a personal touch. Your chatbot, for instance, can also use the names of the user when responding. The Zebrabuzz AI chatbot can also send abandoned cart reminders to customers who forgot to checkout, among many other features.
A tailored and personal approach to service will help you develop customer loyalty which is good in the long run.
