Logging into social media has become a daily routine for the majority of online users. In fact, online users spend up to 2 hours on social media platforms every single day. It’s no wonder that it’s become a primary point of contact when it comes to voicing service related opinions about brands.

Social media has fast become a go-to platform for complaining about or complimenting brands. Social media provides customers with an audience and they know that a complaint can lead to a brand taking a pretty heavy fall right in front of their fans, so it’s in their best interest to sort the issue out. In the same breath, a compliment can do wonders for a brand’s image, and today’s online user won’t hesitate to offer their praise if they feel a brand deserves it.

More and more businesses are realizing that offering customer support on social media is no longer a nice-to-have. Consumers choose to seek support on social media because it’s immediate, something that the online user of today has become accustomed to.

Tips for winning at social media customer support

If you’re going to hire someone to handle customer support on your social media pages, you need to make sure that you are doing it right if you want it to achieve the desired results. Below are a few tips that you can implement in order to keep your fans and customers happy:

Go where your customers are

If you’re currently only present on Twitter but you have picked up on a lot of chatter about your brand on Facebook, it might be more worthwhile to focus your customer support efforts there to begin with.

Don’t make them wait too long

While you can’t always respond to requests as they happen, it pays to answer a customer in 24 hours or less.
Holding off on responding can result in lost customers and the issue escalating faster than you expected. You will have noticed that Facebook now tells users how long you generally take to respond to queries so it’s in your best interest to respond in a timely manner if you want to create a good first impression.

Use the feedback

Your customer complaints are invaluable. Someone is taking the time to tell you exactly where your business is going wrong. If you’re not using the feedback to improve the way you do business, you’re losing out on the chance to grow your business and gain even more customers. If the changes that need to be make are fairly simple to implement, do it as soon as you can. If the changes will take some time to implement, schedule them over the coming months so that you’re continuously making improvements.

Use social media tools

Monitoring social media mentions can be a full time job all on its own so making use of tools such as Social Mention can really make your life a lot easier by helping you keep track of customer feedback so that you can react where necessary.

Connect with your customers

When it comes to responding to a customer question or complaint, it really helps to speak to them like people. Talk to your customers as if you were talking to a friend. If the customer is really angry it might not be the right time to be playful but if you can make light of the situation, it could help ease the tension.

Bonus Tip: In order to keep customer expectations realistic, it might be helpful to outline your support hours.