The digital world, especially the one centered around social media has today become the go-to platform for customers to not just find brands but also validate their image about the business offering. While on one side, social media can help validate the genuineness of a business, on the other side, it can make your business fall prey to the voice of opinionated users – making it difficult for you to find customers. What makes it all the more difficult for brands to create a positive presence is the fact that amidst the high and easy availability of options and alternatives, consumers and customers have become all the more quick when it comes to ditching a business and taking up another. Noting all these challenges, it has become a necessity for businesses to prepare for social media driven customer experience management.
As per data by Dataportal, “3.96 billion people across the planet use social media today, equating to almost 51 percent of the total global population.”
In this article, we are going to look into everything that you need to prepare for establishing a social media based customer experience management programme for your business.
What is Customer Experience Management?
Customer experience management is basically the process which is used by brands for overseeing and tracking the interactions that customers have with a brand throughout their journey. The goal of a CEM strategy is to grow the customer satisfaction, advocacy, and loyalty by first meeting and then exceeding their customers’ expectations.
Role of Social Media in Customer Experience Management
Delivering a memorable and positive customer experience is a complex task. There are several touchpoints across devices and channels, which have to be addressed. And customers have to be talked to in their language to address their queries and issues in the most satisfactory manner, rendering it necessary to let go of automotive machines.
This need to be present on all devices that customers interact with and give them a human voice to share their problems or appreciations with is social media’s forte.
Social media give businesses a platform to show their human side to the customers, who understand what they are going through and what needs to be done to make the process, or their life as a whole, easier.
How To Improve Customer Experience Through Social Media
A. Listen To Your Customers
Irrespective of whether or not you have a set social media budget for your business (which you should), you can still use social media to listen and keep track what is being said about your brand.
While a quick Google search can give you information on what is being talked about your brand, there are software in the market, developed by customer experience specialists that can help you track what is being talked about your business in the digital world. Specialised contact center tools like Omnichannel, can also enable you to link your social channels with the rest of the customer experience suite and not just promptly respond to your customer’s messages but also raise tickets for their issues to be solved quickly. For example, an issue reported in Google Play store or on Facebook messenger should be addressed promptly before the customer becomes really annoyed and takes a hit on your social score.
It is very crucial for you to be on top of what image your business is portraying in the world, for only then you will be able to either take measures to improve or measures to continue the good work.
B. Show Gratitude
Humans want to be appreciated and feel valued. The simple psychology notion stands true for digital customers as well. You will have to find ways to appreciate your customers for their association with your brand.
If a returning customer leaves a positive review for your business, mention their name in your response and do the same for customers who promote your content or simply engage with every single one of your post or tweet.
C. Ask for and Showcase Feedback
Every brand collects feedback from the customers for their service. While sometimes it is through a form, other times it can be through a review or rating on the stores.
What matters is what you do with the collected feedback apart from feeling good within your team?
Ideally, you should treat the feedback as the best promotional content that you could hope for. No matter what feedback you get on your service and in what form, promote it on your social platforms.
D. Deploy a Social Media Centric Customer Experience Team
Every business has a customer support team. But when you are operating in a social world, it is important to take the team beyond your website and bring them on social media.
In most cases business employ a separate team that is responsible for replying to users’ comments in real-time while being empathetic to what they have to say. With omnichannel however, you can save cost by having a same agent respond to customers across channels. The integrated timeline view of the omnichannel, brings together customer interactions happening across different channels in chronological order, so an agent can view the full history of interactions with a customer across channels and respond to their messages on social media with an understanding of context.
Now, showing empathy at times when a user is seemingly unfairly passing negative comments on the brand’s social platforms is a learned skill. So, make time to impart the knowledge to your support team.
E. Revisit the Content you are Pushing
No matter who your customers are, they don’t want to be bombarded with promotional messages for between offline and online platforms, they see adverts in abundance, every day.
What they need is to interact with brands that treat them as humans, while showing them their human side. And in order to achieve that, it is very important that you revisit your content plan. You will need to factor in both promotional and interactive content in the social media feed.
Conclusion
While these are the five pivotal ways through which brands work on their customer experience management through social media, there can be many other strategies operative in the industry.
But what is necessary to make all those social media centric customer experience practices a success is a blend of the right content and right time. While you should behave as a human with your customers on your social media platform, you would also need to be wary of how much you show up on their feed and how it affects their social media experience.