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Are you using social media to deliver better customer service?
Do you want to see how important this new trend could be for your business?
Before we start, here’s a couple of interesting stats which highlight the importance of providing excellent customer care and support through Social Media.
- 95% of businesses believe their customer care has a direct impact on their brand image
- People spend between 3% and 20% more when they get a response to their queries.
Providing good customer service to your clients is key to the success of your company. Add to this the importance of Social Media as a business tool to generate new business, brand recognition and provide consistent and fast customer support and you’ve got the makings of what could be your unique selling proposition; providing excellent Social Media Customer Care.
And just in case you need more persuading, below is a superb infographic from the team at Website Builder which highlights the many reasons you need to consider improving your Social Media Customer Care.
After the infographic, you’ll find a written summary of the key points we feel deserve highlighting.
Why Social Media for Customer Support?
With 54% of Millennials, 52% of Baby Boomers and 50% of Generation X’s admitting to abandoning a brand due to the poor service received, it’s clear that providing fast and efficient customer service through social media channels is key to your business success.
With Social Media adoption at unprecedented levels and customers wanting to communicate with brands through their social networks (90% of social media users have used their social media accounts to communicate with a brand) it appears that providing customer care on your social media channels is a must. 63% of these customers actually expect the companies they do business with to offer customer support on social media.
Stats show that people actually prefer social media for customer care over other channels: 34.5% choose social media and only 16.1% choose a toll-free number!
How providing Social Media Customer Care can benefit your brand?
- Answering a client complaint using social media increases customer advocacy by as much as 25%!
- 75% of people share good experiences with brands on social media.
- 71% of consumers with positive social media customer care experience are likely to recommend the brand to others.
Is this the latest social media trend?
The figures don’t lie and it seems that we are upon a trend which is rapidly growing.
81% of businesses use social media within their customer experience management – how well they do this is another matter!
The online world evolves at a rapid pace and 56% of global consumers have higher expectations for customer service now than they did in 2015. This also means that customer complaints on social media increase substantially (8 times from 2014 to 2015).
Many companies are approaching their social media strategies from the wrong angle
Brands send 23 promotional messages for every 1 response given to their audience. As much as a third of all customer complaints on social media are ignored by companies, that’s a heck of a lot of complaints!
But the big problem is that 80% of companies say that they deliver exceptional social media customer service; unfortunately, only 8% of their customers agree. That’s a big gap which needs to be corrected.
What about the demographics of social media complaints?
So who’s doing all this complaining?
- 47% of consumers aged 18 to 34 have used social media to complain about a brand’s customer support.
- Only 12% of consumers aged over 55 have used social media to complain
- Apparently, women are twice as likely than men to express their frustration for bad customer service online.
These are the main platforms for delivering Social Media Customer Care
With 79% of adult internet users using Facebook, it’s imperative that you establish a proper Customer Service strategy for dealing with Facebook fans queries and questions. The relative response rate on Facebook is 59.4% so that’s your target to strive for.
Brands on average receive 39 messages per 1000 fans on Facebook per month!
80% of social customer service requests come from Twitter. It’s a quick and simple way to get a business’ attention if they have a presence on the platform. Brands on Twitter receive an average of 60 messages per 1000 followers per month.
Instagram’s unbelievable growth in recent years has made it another popular platform for customers to contact companies. Taking into consideration that engagement rate for brands on Instagram is 58 times more per follower than on Facebook and 120 times more per follower than on Twitter, you’d be crazy not to establish a presence on this social network.
Snapchat
You might think that Snapchat isn’t the sort of social network your clients would want to contact you through but bear with us a minute… The number of live videos and snaps on how a product or service works has increased by 400% since 2015.
If your target customers are in the 13 to 34 age group, you need to know that more than 85% of Americans in this age group are regular Snapchat users.
Birchbox is a great example of successfully using Snapchat for customer service. When they tested Snapchat’s phone call feature in 2016 they received 30 calls in one hour!
There are 150 million monthly active pinners out there and 93% of them shopped online in 2014-2015. 83% of Pinterest users would rather follow a brand than a celebrity and 72% use the platform to decide what to buy offline. These impressive figures confirm that Pinterest shouldn’t be ignored.
Possible problems and challenges
Providing excellent social media customer care can improve customer satisfaction rate by 26.6%. The problem is that customers who complain online expect quick responses; 42% expect a response within an hour; 32% expect a response within 30 minutes and 11% expect a response from a brand to be immediate!
With the average response time from businesses being 5 hours, you’ve got yourself a target to strive for. With a little work and organization, you should be able to improve on this figure.
Get it wrong and you’ve got yourself a problem.
Poor response time can lead to up to a 15% increase in customer churn and 30% of people will go to your competitors if you don’t respond.
Not answering a complaint actually decreases customer advocacy by as much as 50%!
And remember that 31% of people post online after they have had a bad customer experience!
Is Social Media Customer Care worth the investment?
The following figures and stats would certainly suggest so!
- Best-in-class customer care causes 81% greater annual increase in revenue from customer referrals.
- For each 1% of shoppers who return for a subsequent visit, overall revenue increases by approximately 10%.
- Best-in-class customer care increases annual ROI by 30.7%.
- Companies with the best social customer care experience 92% customer retention.
- Good social customer care pushes customers to spend 2o to 40% more!
- Brands experience 3 times more increase in revenue by resolving a negative tweet.
When compared with other types of support, social media customer care is cost-effective. It’s almost 63% cheaper than phone support and social media customer service agents are 167% more efficient than voice agents.
Software to manage your Social Media Customer Care
The infographic above mentions several leading Social Media Management softwares; however, the likes of Lithium, Sprinklr and Spredfast are likely to be too expensive for most small businesses. I recommend taking a look at Hootsuite, AgoraPulse, e-Clincher or Sprout Social for more cost-effective options.
Companies that are ‘killing’ it on Social Media with amazing customer service
Whilst the examples of companies using social media customer care to great effect are mainly large multinationals, there’s still a lot small businesses can learn from these social media pioneers. The fact that these companies have managed to increase return on investment and decrease costs thanks to their social media initiatives proves that you can learn a lot from studying their strategies.
KLM’s (Royal Dutch Airlines) social media customer care generates the company $25 million annual revenue and coffee giant Starbucks launched over 300 product improvements by using customers ideas shared on Twitter!
Are you ready to take your social media customer care to the next level?
Apply some of the ideas and tactics outlined in this infographic and you’ll have a competitive advantage over your competition.