Tag Archives: social-media-support

5 Best Practices for Providing Excellent Customer Service on Social Media

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5 Best Practices for Prodving excellent customer service on social media

If you were to check your company’s social media mentions right now, there is a very good chance you would find customers trying to get your attention. According to J.D. Power, 67% of online users are leveraging social media to get in touch with companies for support.  There is no question that ignoring them is a major customer service faux-pas. If your team is going to engage with customers on social media, there are a few best practices to keep in mind before you get started. 

Here are five tips for cultivating successful interactions with your customers and clients on social media. 

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4 Brands Providing Amazing Customer Service with Social Media

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4 Brands Providing Amazing Customer Service with Social Media-450While call centers continue to be a crucial component to a company’s customer service strategy, digital avenues are also becoming increasingly popular. In order for brands to remain competitive and provide the level of service consumers are expecting, they must take a multi-pronged approach to their customer service tactics.

The call center remains the ideal avenue to funnel in customers who are less tech-literate as well as those with more complex concerns. However, social media is an excellent avenue to resolve less complex concerns that a buying public are hoping to resolve quickly.

Let’s take a look at a few brands that provide great examples of how to effectively use social media for customer support. Each company uses a different strategy and tone; however, all are notable examples of how companies can offer up great digital support.

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How to Use Social Media to Support Your Customers

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How to Use Social Media to Support Customers

Tweet.

As early as the 19th century, “tweet” was a charming term in the English language, evocative of the gentle vocal stylings of small birds. Now it refers to the music of a rather different beast, one that, at its loudest, can deafen and defeat businesses. Twitter, among other social platforms, has in recent years become a mighty digital megaphone for many frustrated (or conversely, happy) customers. A Tweet has become so much a part of communication in certain cultures and how they interact with the world that it is not just a noun: It’s a very powerful verb. And, as we’ve seen in now notorious cases (lest we forget the United Airlines incident), it’s become a way for customers to size up and shout about serious blunders in customer service to an ever-growing court of public opinion.

That being said: Social media platforms aren’t solely used for public brand-shaming. In fact, we should regard them with even a smidgen of positivity, as they are unique conversation channels that present pathways towards establishing and maintaining relationships with customers. For those of us invested in improving our customer support offerings, we must acknowledge social media as a remarkable space in which to play. It presents a unique opportunity to offer customer support and service for legitimate customer support questions; that is, it’s possible to have a non-turbulent tête-à-tête on Twitter, Facebook, and other channels.
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10 Trends That Will Disrupt Customer Service in 2018 [White Paper]

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10 Trends That Will Disrupt Customer Service in 2018“I feel the need, the need for speed!”

In Top Gun, the 1986 classic, Pete “Maverick” Mitchell’s famous phrase effectively summed up the future of customer service (CS). While it wasn’t intended to evoke the relationship between business and consumer, over 30 years later, it speaks directly to the state of CS today.

Speed is arguably the most significant benchmark for every single customer service interaction today.  Businesses can never be too fast to reply, react, or resolve an issue. As channel choices continue to stack up, and consumers navigate through them with swift precision, the expectation to be ‘ready and waiting’ at all times of the day is now the gold standard in customer service.

Despite this, recent reports reveal that the average time to handle a customer service request is 15 hours and 17 minutes – a far cry from first-class service expectations. But of the 12 industries that improved customer satisfaction in 2016, nine of them had something in common: They each sped up First Response Time (FRT). When issues are resolved in the initial five minutes of first contact, the average customer satisfaction score is 90 (on a 100-point scale). If resolved in six to 10 minutes, the satisfaction rating drops seven points to 83, and continues dropping steadily as additional time passes. Therefore, responding quickly will help to stave off declining satisfaction.

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The Next Big Thing in Social Customer Service

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The Next Big Thing in Social Customer ServiceThe weight social media has on brand affinity and customer satisfaction is constantly growing. Today 84% of consumers expect companies to respond within 24 hours after posting on social media, while 72% of Twitter complaints expect a response within an hour. But what does this mean for the future of customer service? Well, it’s been said that social customer care is actually the new business marketing. We are in an age where customer service has the potential to go viral, which means there is a lot more at stake for brands. Therefore, businesses must remain on the pulse of new innovations to ensure consistency and quality. Continue reading →

3 Takeaways from Our Live Discussion on Crisis Management for Customer Service [Video]

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3 Takeaways from Our Live Discussion on Crisis Management for Customer ServiceLast week, Fonolo hosted an insightful live discussion on how to handle customer service in a crisis. This expert panel discussed what brands can do to ensure that customer service is not compromised during times of stress in the contact center. They touched on social media for crisis management, reducing customer frustration, and so much more! To save you some time, we’ve extracted video snippets showcasing highlights from the discussion.

First, let’s take a quick look at the panel of speakers: Nate Brown from UL EHS Sustainability, Jim Rembach from Beyond Morale, Shep Hyken from Shepard Presentations, Rainer Uphoff from Avionline, Omer Minkara from Aberdeen Group, and Shai Berger from Fonolo.

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How to Deliver Great Customer Service in a Crisis [Live Discussion]

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How to Deliver Great Customer Service in a CrisisOn any given day, contact centers run the risk of experiencing a surge in call volume. That risk is amplified when unexpected events like poor weather, high agent absenteeism, or technical issues occur. When these things happen, call centers must be prepared to address customer needs in a timely and courteous way, despite the challenging situation. News of poor customer service reaches more than twice as many ears as praise for good service, so reducing the number of negative interactions is integral to a brand’s reputation.

Although most companies understand this, they continue to leave customers on hold. Brands who value the customer experience know that this is not acceptable. Luckily, with the proper solutions in place, any contact center can effectively deliver high quality service, even in a crunch. Continue reading →

4 Call Center Reports Worth Your Time

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4 Call Center Reports Worth Your TimeOne of our goals with the Fonolo blog is to help you stay current on the many aspects of the fast-moving contact center industry. To that end, we’re always on the look-out for new industry research, studies, surveys and whitepapers.

The vast number of companies doing “content marketing” means there is a lot of material out there. Sadly, that’s made it hard to find quality among all the fluff, so we’ve assembled 4 recent reports that we feel are worth your time. We’d like to express how grateful we are to the authors (and sponsors that back them) for the hard work that goes in to producing this content. They feature original research and cover topics such as consumer channel preference, the growth of chat, the ROI of social media for customer support, and much more.

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Twitter Still Wants to Be a Customer Service Channel

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Twitter Still Wants to Be a Customer Service ChannelWhat a strange place Twitter is in. Consider the incredible influence it holds in the daily news cycle. Newscasts and white house press briefings talk about “tweets” with a seriousness that makes it easy to forget that no one outside the early-adopter circles had even heard that word before 2008. Or consider how iOS treats “tweeting” as a system-level communication option, on par with email and text messaging.

And yet, the company continues to struggle against sluggish subscriber growth and impatient investors. There were rumours throughout last year, that a sale was imminent. Part of the problem is that Twitter, as a product is successful in a few different “roles”. It works as a PR conduit for politicians and celebrities; as a global chat system; and as a customer service channel. That last role gets the least amount of public attention, but the company’s recent actions show that it sees a real future in this direction.

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The Secret Behind Twitter’s Customer Service Superpower

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People Don’t Get Twitter’s Strength as a Customer Service ChannelThe burning questions for the customer service industry today are which channels of communication are currently most relevant, and which will be most relevant down the road. In recent months, the discussion has centered around Facebook Messenger and other messaging channels.Many people are debating whether any of these platforms (Messager, Snapchat, Kik, Line, etc) can “win” the B2C communication platform war. (See here, here or here.) The fact that WeChat has seemingly “won” China, and achieved near dominance of online customer service, adds fuel to this fire. (My take on that: Will the WeChat Model Work in the West?)

Then Facebook opened Messenger to automation, i.e. “Chatbots”, and the fire went supernova. (The role of bots in customer service is the topic of a live online discussion we’re hosting next week with a great panel of experts. Register here to join the Google Hangout.)

Lost in all this glare has been Twitter, which continues to be a powerful – and popular – channel for customers to interact with businesses. This is somewhat puzzling because, on the surface, it’s not really well-suited for this purpose. What’s the secret to Twitter’s enduring popularity as a customer service channel? Continue reading →

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