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The quality of customer experience your brand extends on social media can swing both ways—it can either be extraordinary or a disaster in the making. Let’s look at what the data tells us:
- Users typically end up spending an average of 144 minutes on social media in a day.
- Further research indicates that around 57% of customers follow brands on social media to learn about new products and services, while 47% like to stay up-to-date on company news.
Unsurprisingly, the same research indicates that a staggering 74% of customers use social media to reach out to the brand for customer service or support.
What’s more, around 37% of customers typically message a brand on social media due to customer service issues, whereas 6 in 10 people message brands after a great experience.
Clearly, the gap social media is lowering the gap between customers and brands, one post at a time. In this blog, we will look at how brands can leverage social media to their advantage and deliver a high-quality customer experience–one that their customers will never forget. Let’s get started.
Top 7 Socially-Driven CX Strategies
1. Start Conversations And Powerful Campaigns That Boost User Engagement
No customer likes to be constantly bombarded with the same ad everywhere they go. In fact, a case of “brand-stalking” is bound to leave your customers annoyed and running in the opposite direction.
To tackle this, here are some ways in which you can mix up your content by using a variety of content formats, prevent fatigue, and engage in real-time conversations with customers:
1. Interactive quizzes such as the following one by State Farm:
2. Fun customer testimonials:
3. Informative webinars
4. Giveaway contests
Image Source: Ipsy Instagram
5. User-generated content:
Image Source: GoPro Instagram
At this stage, it is worth noting that brands should think about bringing out their personality through witty, funny, bold, or entertaining posts—the last one being the most liked by customers according to research.
Key takeaway: Brands should focus on driving content that can engage customers in casual conversations while delivering value at the same time. One of the most effective ways to do so is to create a content calendar that takes into account various factors such as content format, messaging, imagery, personality, tone, etc.
2. Focus On Mining Insightful Data
Since social media is freely available to anyone and everyone, and your customers are consistently exposed to content from your competitors, it helps to keep tabs and do your research on what the competition is doing:
In addition to this, it helps to get ahead of the industry’s best practices to follow. This will also help you compare how your brand is faring in terms of the quality of customer support, performance levels, engagement levels, etc.:
Key takeaway: Reviewing what your competition is doing and how you’re stacked up in the industry circles can often turn out to be an eye-opener. By analyzing real-time data, you can work towards improving your social media strategies‘ shortcomings and deliver a superior customer experience.
3. Go Online And Go Big
When it comes to social media, different platforms cater to different kinds of target audiences. This is why you need to ask yourself the following questions before understanding which platforms to be active on:
- Which channels do your customers prefer? For example, is it only Instagram or Facebook or both?
- How should you interact with users over the preferred channels? Should your tone be formal or informal? How should you respond to customer queries?
- Will you need to invest in any social monitoring tool to monitor your brand and provide insights on user analytics, customer care, etc.?
Key takeaway: When it comes to social media, it helps to diversify your portfolio and empower customers with a wide variety of support channels across platforms. Additionally, prioritizing prompt and helpful responses to customer queries and concerns can significantly enhance customer satisfaction and foster a positive brand image.
4. (Response) Time Is of The Essence
Customers dislike waiting of any kind, especially when it comes to addressing their queries. This is where the power of customer support tools truly shines. Here are a few ways in which you can boost your response time, and in turn, customer satisfaction levels:
- You can enable auto-responses. However, care should be taken to ensure that your responses are not templatized or, worse, out of context.
- You can unify all your customer communications, from live chat software and social media to private notes and audio and video calls through a centralized inbox.
Key takeaway: If your brand is active on social media, ensuring a speedy, empathetic, and accurate response for each and every customer comment should be a priority.
5. Adopt An ‘Emotional’ Mindset Focused On Customer-Centricity
In order to adopt this mindset, we need to define customer centricity. It’s about knowing what your customers want and need and basing all of your product decisions on that knowledge.
When it comes to social media, it is acceptable to flaunt your brand’s values, ethos, and work culture. After all, customers crave an emotional connection with brands and like to speak to real people, not inanimate brands themselves.
This is why it is important that your brand displays its human side, often and with conviction as Adidas demonstrates by retweeting its direct competitor – Nike’s – ad on a sensitive topic such as “Black Lives Matter”:
Key takeaway: The more positively your customers connect with your brand, the more likely they are to become loyal and trusting towards the brand.
6. Make Second Impressions Count with Social Media
It’s no secret that plenty of times, customers get onto social media to vent and voice their frustration after a bad experience. But handling the situation with promptness and care can diffuse the situation before it goes out of hand.
Take, for example, Amazon’s case where Jeff Bezos is seen responding to a mistake made by Amazon Kindle in a subtle, honest, and graceful manner.
In such a scenario, brands should be upfront and own up to their mistakes. This sense of honesty and ownership will go a long way in overturning irritated customers to happier brand loyalists.
Key takeaway: Social media acts as a perfect avenue for brands looking to create a better second impression. By responding to the customer’s queries with heartfelt messages, they can turn the tide in their favor.
7. Integrate Live Chat and AI-Powered Chatbots for Real-Time Customer Support
Get this: 56% of customers will unfollow brands on social media due to ‘poor customer service.’
Tying back to the point of responding to customer queries instantly and in real-time, brands should make sure to the intuitive live chat feature or use 24×7, AI-enabled chatbots to tackle a fair share of the CX team’s workload.
Customers expect a response to their social media questions within 24 hours. These automated tools allow brands to connect with customers round-the-clock, offer important product and service-related information at the click of a button, provide satisfactory solutions to customer queries within seconds, and capture real-time feedback for continuous improvement.
Key takeaway: Truth be told, real-time customer support is the name of the game for some of the top-performing brands in the world. The idea is to provide unparalleled convenience to your customers and get to the root of their problems instantly.
Wrapping Up
The number of social media users is expected to rise to 4.41 billion by 2025.
In other words, more than half the world’s population will be active on social media—doubling up as a huge opportunity for expanding user reach, delivering a holistic and consistent customer experience, and offering true value to customers through emotionally-charged customer experiences on these digital platforms.
To wrap up, here are the top seven strategies to keep in mind when creating a foolproof social media CX strategy:
- Drive two-way conversations and powerful campaigns to boost user engagement.
- Laser-focus on mining insightful data.
- Provide plenty of online support to your customers.
- Keep your responses relevant and quick.
- Adopt an emotional mindset focused on customer-centricity.
- Make second impressions count.
- Integrate live chat and AI-powered chatbots for real-time customer support
Srushti Shah is an ambitious, passionate, and out-of-the-box thinking woman having vast exposure to Digital Marketing. She is working as a Digital Marketer and Content writer at Acquire.
Her key focus is to serve her clients with the latest innovation in her field leading to fast and effective results. Working beyond expectations and delivering the best possible results in her professional motto. Other than work, she loves traveling, exploring new things, and spending quality time with family. Reach out to Srushti Shah on Twitter or LinkedIn
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