Liveworld

Part 2 in the Series: Social Customer Service
Social customer service is growing by leaps and bounds. Nielson found that 33% of customers prefer it to the phone – and that number will only go up.
Listening to social conversations and detecting customer service issues are key – you can’t respond to customer questions or complaints on social media if you don’t know they’re talking about you and how they are talking about you.
If you don’t have a solid listening program in place, your business can suffer. In fact, 66% of customers have stopped doing business with a company due to bad customer service experiences.
Brands that are successfully managing social customer service are able to intelligently detect conversations on social channels like Twitter and Facebook, using criteria meaningful to that brand. This could include searching for conversations based on keywords, themes, sentiment, language, and content types. For example, you could decide to only monitor conversations about your products in North America, monitor every product line globally, or only look for posts in Spanish.
By leveraging social listening tools with integrated analytics and business rules tailored to your organization, you will alleviate the burden on your social media team to review individual posts – and help ensure your brand isn’t missing conversations that need a response.
After brands detect social customer service issues, they need to intelligently organize, prioritize and route the conversations – so that the right teams or departments can quickly deliver the appropriate response.
One major airline recently received flak for automatically sending out an upbeat auto response to disgruntled mentions on Twitter. While acknowledging customers and positivity are usually good things, if the response doesn’t match the customer sentiment, it’s worse than not acknowledging the customer at all and can trigger social backlash.
To sum things up:

• Social customer service is becoming increasingly more important
• Listening to social conversations about your brand is key to providing great customer service in social media
• Utilize a social listening tool to scale your efforts and ensure you don’t miss important conversations about your brand
• Delivering the right response is critical to avoiding social backlash

To learn more about LiveWorld’s social customer service click here.
Next up: The importance of responding to customers on social media.