By Keegan Weber, Product Manager at DataEQ
The ways in which people interact with the world around them have changed. Phone calls are viewed as disruptive, while setting up an in-person meeting is now reserved for only the most sensitive of matters.
With this, the expectation for customer service has evolved. Gone are the days of customers patiently sitting on hold with a call centre. Today, people expect instant, omnichannel customer care. This means going beyond just providing customer assistance, to create a personal and open line of communication between customers and your business.
Here are five simple steps to develop a powerful social customer care strategy in 2022:
1. Identify all customer touchpoints
Ensure that you have the tools and resources in place to service all points of customer contact, from start to finish of the customer journey. This includes everything from in-store service to website experience, and the growing touchpoint of social media customer service.
2. Monitor your brand
By tracking the various channels to identify where your brand is mentioned, you’ll be able to better understand the perceptions of customers and non-customers alike. This will also alert you to potential crises as they arise and enable the business to respond before anything spirals out of control.
3. Optimise social service workflow
While brand monitoring is a good start, prioritising customer interactions will allow agents to respond to interactions that matter most. By optimising workflow and identifying the priority posts that require an urgent response, tickets are also easily routed to the right agent in the team, saving the business time and ensuring that priority conversation does not go unanswered.
4. Employ a competent customer care team
Over time, some organisational processes have become somewhat redundant, while others – like social media customer service - have come to require increasingly more attention. Businesses need to invest in these areas of growth by employing and upskilling suitable personnel in order to build a strong team of social media customer support agents.
5. Build a robust customer service toolkit
Today, social media agents need to be empowered to service customers timeously and assist with resolving their queries with minimum turnaround time. By equipping agents with the tools and permissions required to deal with customer service complaints at scale, the outdated community manager role can expand towards a social customer care role.