Well, offering quality social media customer service is no easy job. You need always to be aware of new customer inquiries on different platforms and be able to respond fast and efficiently.
Unattended requests and disregarded comments left on social media can escalate to bigger issues before you can tell what went wrong. Even if you respond to every message or comment and mention regarding your brand, it’s essential to realize that there is much more to customer service than merely replying to your customers online.
Only a small part of support requests mention the relevant brands on social media. You can find the rest by using social listening. Leveraging social listening tools to help you tune into these conversations can significantly enhance your customer service across social channels.
In this article, you’ll find out how social listening can help you provide top-notch customer service on social media and beyond.
Table of Contents
What is Social Media Customer Service?
Social media customer service is simply the process of offering customer support on social media by responding to customer inquiries, complaints, and requests and providing a solution.
It includes answering DMs, replying to social media posts, and in some cases even responding to online reviews.
With 1 in 4 Gen Z, Millennials, and Gen X saying that social media DMs are their preferred way to get customer service from a company, you can understand how important it is to offer quality customer support on social media.
Nonetheless, customer service on social media doesn’t stop at direct communication with customers. The process also involves identifying new pain points, building brand trust, uncovering valuable customer preferences, and more.
In simple words, using social media for customer service helps your business be in direct contact with your customers 24/7, offering convenient and fast problem-solving.
Examples of Customer Service on Social Media
To understand the concept of customer service on social media, let’s see how famous brands do it in real life.
Example #1: Sephora collecting feedback
Sephora, as a popular international brand with thousands of physical stores and an e-commerce website, receives a huge amount of customer inquiries, complaints, and feedback on social media.
But Sephora’s team handles them always timely and respectfully as you can see in the example below.
Source: Sephora on X
Example #2: Slack reporting bugs
Slack is a well-known brand for offering exceptional online customer service. Users frequently share their experiences with Slack’s software and inform the team about bugs and malfunctions. Slack’s team always ensures users that their feedback is heard, valued, and taken into account.
See, for instance, how they handled a bug-reporting situation the right way below.
Source: Slack on X
Example #3: Starbucks accommodating unusual requests
Starbucks’ customer care is exemplary not only in person but also online. Their team manages to assist customers even with the most unusual requests to keep them happy and content.
Simply, take a look at the example below.
Source: Starbucks on X
Why Should You Use Social Listening For Social Media Customer Service?
You can’t keep your customers happy unless you’re fully aware of all the customer inquiries you receive on social media.
Sometimes, people don’t tag your account. So, these mentions can slip under your radar and remain unanswered, a bad sign for your business.
Customers feel neglected and they will share their frustration with others, online and offline. Social listening can help you avoid this pitfall. It’s the method of tracking brand mentions, comments, conversations, or any online activity related to your business offerings or even industry-related topics.
Furthermore, social listening tools help you stay in the loop of new mentions with real-time notifications and respond fast through an all-in-one platform.
Also, once you gather all those online conversations about your brand, you can analyze them to discover actionable insights.
Let’s see specifically how social listening can boost your customer service.
How to Boost Your Customer Service with Social Listening
With social listening, you can deliver great customer care and improve the whole experience for your buyers, which can help you grow your business.
Let’s see together how to use social listening in customer service.
1. Respond to Your Customers Promptly
Having a social listening tool scanning all platforms for your brand mentions helps you respond quickly to customer inquiries.
Your customer service teams don’t have to switch between platforms to reply to tweets, answer Instagram comments, and respond to TikToks. A social listening tool gathers all these mentions in a single dashboard and reduces the response time.
Also, you can rest assured you haven’t missed any customer inquiries, whether the user has tagged your official account or not. Social listening is the perfect way to spot every conversation around your brand everywhere online so that you can jump into and offer your assistance.
Never miss a customer question
With Mentionlytics, you can discover every little mention of your brand, product, or service — tagged or untagged — all in one place.
2. Handle Negative Reviews and Complaints
Don’t just respond to customers but resolve their issues, too. A well-worded, timely response to a negative review is a good start.
However, your work just doesn’t end there. Critically analyze what and why the customer had the issue with your product or service and identify the deeper problem imminent.
Social listening tools let you find detailed information about a comment, message, or conversation and help you be proactive.
For instance, if a customer complains about their bad experience with an impolite sales representative, don’t just pay them lip service. Instead, take concrete measures to fix the situation and let your customers know that their concerns are valid and valued.
Furthermore, chances are that if something is wrong with your product, social media is where you’ll find out about it. Ensure that you pay attention to even the smallest problems and customer concerns. Also, acknowledge their contribution and let them know how they helped you.
3. Gain Valuable Customer Insights
Social media are not just customer service channels. They have so much more to offer.
Social listening can help you determine the topics and content that your customers love and often engage with. And naturally, the better you understand your customers’ interests, the more you can speak directly to their hearts.
This means you can develop and share more relevant content and engage with customers in their preferred tone.
4. Identify Customer Pain Points
By tracking industry keywords with a social listening tool, you can uncover hidden customer pain points. How? People share their frustrations on social media and ask for help.
Most probably they won’t tag your brand. But they use relevant keywords and hashtags. So, if you monitor these keywords and hashtags you can tap into these online conversations and identify common pain points you haven’t heard of.
Also, customer views and opinions shared on social platforms are more authentic and reliable than in interviews or questionnaires because they tend to be more genuine and honest. Social listening tools help you gather all this feedback, which is pure gold for improving your customer care and offerings.
5. Rebuild Your Customers’ Trust In Your Brand
Through social listening tools, you can spot social media conversations that don’t mention your brand in a good light. This helps you understand where you need to rebuild brand trust by helping them out with their unique needs.
That way, you assure them that their problems don’t go unheard and that you are there to assist in the best way possible.
This is a great strategy to prevent social media backlashes and PR crises as you resolve issues early. It’s fundamental for protecting your reputation and improving your brand image.
Tips for Better Social Listening and Customer Service
In this section, we share our social listening wisdom. Follow the tips below to improve your customer service by getting better social listening results.
Keep your Dashboard Organized
Using a social listening tool to gather and respond to your customer queries is handy. That’s because you don’t have to switch between social media channels. Rather, you do all the work from a single dashboard.
However, you should keep your dashboard neat and well-organized to avoid chaos. Especially, if you have numerous team members in your customer service.
In Mentionlytics you can find a lot of features to keep your dashboards tidy.
For example, you can create different tags for your mentions to highlight what they’re about. Or label them in different colors to distinguish mentions between good, bad, irrelevant, etc. at a glance.
Additionally, you can assign mentions to team members so that everyone knows who responds to each mention.
Activate Real-Time Alerts
It’s essential to stay updated on every new customer inquiry that pops up on social networks. This will help you reduce response time and prioritize better.
Here’s what to do: Set up real-time notifications, so that every time a user mentions your brand, product, or service, you’ll receive it through your inbox.
In Mentionlytics you can highly customize your alerts to get notified only for what’s important to you. And SIA will send you a notification in case of a spike in your mentions that needs your immediate attention.
That way you’ll stay in the loop and make sure no mention goes unanswered.
Prioritize based on Sentiment Analysis
Sentiment analysis not only indicates how your customers feel about your brand but also helps you prioritize customer requests.
You know negative mentions — a.k.a. frustrated customers — needs to be your top priority. Resolving their issues is necessary to prevent churn.
So, by filtering your mentions with the “negative sentiment” filter, you can isolate only the unsatisfied customers’ mentions and respond to them first.
Thus, you can make sure they don’t wait long for your answer and their dissatisfaction is not growing.
Track Competitors as well
Social listening tools give you a golden opportunity to spy on your competitors even for customer service.
You should track their brand names, products, and services and glance every now and then at what people ask about them.
That will give you an idea of what users might ask about your products/services as well and be prepared. Also, it’s a source of inspiration for your FAQ page.
Not to mention that by tracking your competitor’s activity you can benchmark your response time and see if it needs improvement.
Don’t Neglect Hashtags
Are you monitoring only your brand name on social media? That’s a huge mistake!
Customers usually post about your brand using your branded hashtags instead of your brand name or official account. So, in case you don’t monitor hashtags you’ll end up missing these mentions.
Here’s what to do: Add your branded hashtags and important campaign hashtags as keywords to monitor in your social listening tool ASAP.
That way you can rest assured you won’t miss any conversation regarding your brand and offerings.
Ready to Boost Your Customer Service on Social Media?
To wrap it up, social listening is the ultimate solution to providing better social media customer service.
When customers expect brands to be at their disposal 24/7 and on every platform, you can’t be always present without tools that make the process a lot easier.
So, don’t wait any longer. Start social listening for free and see in action how it can help you keep your customers happy.
