Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that social media has become inseparable from our daily lives. Each of us prefer to spend time on anywhere between 2 or 3 social platforms. We use social networks for staying updated and keeping others updated about ourselves or things that matter to us. Our social buzz can be around professional topics & events, friends, family, relatives, hobbies and interests.
Customers are quick to criticize brands on social media to evoke a response from them. This should be seen as an opportunity rather than a threat to reputation.
Social media as a communication medium has found favor with brands who want to engage with their audience. It also makes a lot of sense for brands to use this medium for better serving their customers. Customers are quick to criticize brands on social media to evoke a response from them. This should be seen as an opportunity rather than a threat to reputation. Response to a publicly raised complaint shows that your brand cares and it’s there for everyone to see.
Brands need to be prepared to meet customer expectation of quick turn-around-time on social media. It can be challenging for brands to respond within an hour or few hours, but this is what customers now expect. The good thing is that such quick turn-around is possible. Brands can do so by adopting social listening practices.
What is social listening? It’s a way of collating brand conversations from multiple social networks, complaint forums, news sites, review sites and blogs. It’s easier for a brand’s response team to handle queries and complaints when all conversations are neatly laid out in front of them. Social media listening tools do the heavy lifting for the response team so they don’t have to be logged into different social networks and more importantly nothing is missed.
Each of us prefer one social network over another when raising complaints. I may prefer to tweet about it, while you may prefer to blog about it. No matter what brand you deal with, brand conversations are scattered all over the internet. Social media listening tools (the good ones) gather information from everywhere either by crawling or relying on a third party data provider.
Some of the best purpose-built social listening tools like Konnect Social have been built with businesses in mind. They have must-have response management features like –
- Social CRM workflow for distributing response tasks
- Response notes for viewing complaint resolution updates and past history
- Ability to integrate with your existing CRM to get a single view of the customer
- Tracking individual and team Turn-Around-Time (TAT) performance
- Ability to classify conversations to generate business intelligence
- On screen alerts for overdue issues
Social media listening is a highly systematic and measurable activity that streamlines all your customer service needs. It takes a lot of hassle out of the more traditional customer service approaches –
- Customers don’t have to wait in an IVR queue
- They don’t have to be kept on hold for conferring with supervisors and managers
- No telephonic conversations need to be recorded for reviewing in the future
- No expensive software infrastructure is needed to maintain complaint logs
For instance, Konnect Social’s customers from industries like telecom, banking and insurance can now boast of having an average turn-around-time of anywhere between 10 minutes to 2 hours. And that’s not just for acknowledgement but complaint resolution. These customers are sending out a lot of positive feelers on social media as they feel valued by such quick response.
Using social media to serve customers offers brands the opportunity to create deeper engagement with them. Negative experiences stick in our memories for a long time, but those which are transformed into pleasant ones become unforgettable.