How to Integrate Social Media in Your Customer Experience Strategy

What Is a Customer Experience (CX) Strategy?

A customer experience strategy outlines how a company aims to provide a positive and consistent experience to its customers.

From initial awareness and consideration through purchase, post-purchase support, and beyond, all customer touchpoints are included.

At its core, a customer experience strategy has the following goals:

1. To minimize customer efforts
2. To create a seamless process
3. To drive emotional connection
4. To enhance customer loyalty and advocacy

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The primary goal of crafting a customer experience strategy is to create a seamless, satisfying, and memorable experience that can help you serve your customers so well that they automatically become your brand advocates.

Why Is Social Media Important In A Customer Experience Strategy?

Much like a piece of customer experience management software, social media plays an indispensable role in crafting a solid CX strategy for several reasons:

• Customer Engagement: Social media platforms provide a direct channel for companies to engage with their customers in real-time. Customers can raise queries, provide you feedback, and share their product or brand experience(s), and you can respond promptly. Additionally, leveraging a robust CX platform can further streamline customer interactions across various social media channels, ensuring a unified and efficient approach to managing customer experiences.

• Customer Support: Most customers jump straight to social media, especially Twitter, to get support instead of raising an email ticket to the customer support team. Offering customer service through social channels allows you to address issues quickly and publicly, demonstrating how much you value top-notch customer care. It also provides you with an opportunity to resolve problems before they escalate.
• Personalization: Understanding a customer’s likes and dislikes from their social media activity can help you recommend products or services that are a good fit for them. Personalization of product recommendations is key because it can lead to higher conversion rates.

• Real-Time Updates: If you run an eCommerce store, social media allows you to share real-time updates about product launches, events, and important announcements. This keeps your customers informed and engaged, and it can drive direct sales and active (and somewhat intimate) participation.

• Crisis Management: In the event of a crisis or negative publicity, social media provides a platform for you to communicate transparently and manage your reputation. Timely and honest responses can mitigate damage and rebuild trust.

How to Build A Customer Experience Strategy

Now that all the benefits of using social media from start to finish to service your customers are laid out, it’s time for us to explore how to build a customer experience strategy.

These are the steps you need to follow:

1. Perform consumer research
2. Map your customer’s journey
3. Train customer service staff
4. Determine customer expectations
5. Collect feedback  

1. Consumer Research

No marketing strategy can save even the best products if they don’t solve actual customer problems first.

So, to begin with, you need to figure out the social media platform where your target audience spends the most time. Make this choice using a decision tree that factors in demographic data, user behavior, and industry trends.

For example, if your audience is predominantly young professionals, platforms like LinkedIn or Instagram might be more suitable than Facebook. Thankfully, SocialBee can be your go-to tool when analyzing your audience’s demographic, allowing you to shape a loyal customer base.

Find out your social media audience demographics with SocialBee.

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Go beyond demographics and get deep into the interests, behaviors, and pain points of your ideal customers. Use audience analytics and social listening tools to gain insights into what topics and content resonate with them, and more importantly, why.

Study your competitors’ social media presence. For best customer relationship management, try to understand why your prospects rave about a competitor(s). Is it their witty Insta content or real-time customer support on Twitter, and so on? Deconstruct your competitor’s best game to understand your ideal customers well.

2. Map Your Customer Journey

A customer journey map outlines the way customers are going to travel through your marketing funnel. This gives you a pretty good estimate of how they’ll behave at each touchpoint.

That’s why, in your customer journey map, pinpoint the key interactions customers have with your brand on social media. These touchpoints might include content discovery, engagement, customer service inquiries, and post-purchase feedback.

When crafting your own customer experience management system, understand the emotions and experiences associated with each touchpoint. For instance, a customer who reaches out for support on social media may be frustrated or in need of urgent assistance, while someone who interacts with your content may be seeking inspiration or information.

And here’s the kicker and you cannot miss this: 

Ensure that the social media touchpoints integrate seamlessly with other elements in the overall customer journey. Consistency in messaging, branding, and service quality is crucial.

Experimenting with different kinds of messaging is a vital process to determine what works with your audience and what does not. Make A/B testing a habit when it comes to refining your customer journey. 

3. Train Customer Service Staff

You can have all the right customer service systems in place, but if the frontline service soldiers (customer service reps) don’t know how to deal with your customers correctly, you’ll always end up disappointing them.

These are some tips for training effective customer service teams:

• Develop clear guidelines and best practices for customer service provided via your social media accounts. This should include details on response times (e.g., respond within X hours), the tone of communication (e.g., polite, empathetic, and professional), and issue resolution procedures. Specify when to take conversations private (via DM’s) to address sensitive customer issues.
• Emphasize the importance of empathy and effective communication while dealing with customer issues. Train your staff to put themselves in the customer’s shoes and respond with understanding and compassion. Encourage active listening skills to fully grasp the customer’s problem before offering a solution.
• Integrate your social media with the rest of the customer support channels. Many customers come to social media after they have exhausted all their other options talking to your reps on your business phone line or email. Make sure your social media staff can pull in all the details related to the complaint right away in order to serve your customers better. 
• Since social media is nothing but a public forum, your responses should be professional and empathetic. Doing just this thing well, will instantly set you apart from the crowd of companies in your niche.
• Train your team to handle potential crises on social media with poise and transparency. A well-prepared team can turn a crisis into an opportunity to demonstrate exceptional customer service.

4. Determine Customer Expectations

The secret to captivating your customers: anticipate their desires and deliver even before they express them.

To be able to create memorable customer experiences, follow these tips to understand their expectations: 

• Configure your chosen social listening tools to track mentions of your brand, industry, relevant keywords, and competitors. This will help you keep an eye on conversations related to your business.
• Regularly review the data collected by your CRM to identify common themes and trends. Pay attention to recurring topics, sentiment (positive, negative, neutral), and the key issues that customers are discussing.
• Categorize the information you gather into different segments or categories. For example, you might have segments for product-related feedback, customer service issues, suggestions for improvements, and so on.
• Create feedback loops on social media by actively seeking customer input and opinions. Conduct polls, surveys, and ask for feedback in a way that encourages participation. You can incentivize or gamify it by getting feedback in exchange for a giveaway!

5. Collect Feedback

To continually improve your service, you need direct feedback from your customers. Only they can tell you if they’re happy with your service.

Here’s what you need to do in order to collect customer feedback:

• Establish clear channels for customers to provide feedback on social media — such as comments, DM’s, or dedicated feedback posts. Make it easy for customers to reach out and share their thoughts.
• Use social media analytics tools such as SocialBee to track engagement metrics, sentiment analysis, and trends. Measure your performance against KPIs like response time, customer satisfaction, and engagement rates.
• Actively engage with customer feedback and respond promptly. Positive feedback should be acknowledged and reinforced, while negative feedback should be addressed with empathy and a commitment to resolve issues. 

Keep your CX strategy strong by promptly responding to comments, mentions, and DMs.

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By actively collecting feedback, you’ll be able to stay on top of the changing needs and desires of your customers.