From complaints to resolutions: 14 Best practices for social media support

Navigating the growing customer demands entails keeping pace with their preferred communication channels. Almost 5 billion people globally use social media today, so going social is more than just a trend. It’s an operational imperative. This establishes social media support as an essential tool allowing businesses to meet customer expectations.

This article will discuss why social media support is a powerful strategy for strengthening brand image and customer loyalty. We’ll touch upon the challenges of ensuring consistently outstanding performance.

If you seek to exceed customer expectations and drive long-term engagement, this is your comprehensive guide. You’ll learn the best practices and gain insights into crafting a social media support strategy that effectively resolves issues and drives business growth.

What is social media support?

Social media support is the strategic use of platforms like Facebook, X, and WhatsApp to deliver customer service. In this framework, companies engage with customers by responding to inquiries, solving problems, and delivering updates. All these activities take place within the social media ecosystem where users already spend time.

This approach combines reactive customer assistance, such as responding to queries and complaints, with proactive engagement, like disseminating important updates or promotional content. Social media support allows businesses to engage with customers where they’re most comfortable: in their social media feeds.

There are several nuances of social media support businesses can offer:

• Through public comments on feed posts – this allows open interaction and foster community engagement.
• Via private or direct messages – this provides a confidential means of communication for more personal or sensitive matters.
• On social media groups – these serve as dedicated spaces for niche communities to share resources and discuss shared interests.

Why should you consider social media support?

Embracing social media support is a business imperative. This is especially true when considering recent statistics:

Let’s discuss the advantages and challenges of using social media as a customer support channel.

The pros of social media as a support channel

Here are some of the key pros when it comes to using social media as a support channel.

• Direct yet unobtrusive communication: Social media allows companies to address customer issues without being invasive. It’s a channel that feels more personal and that customers already use in their daily lives.
• Universally accessible: Social media is available on all devices consumers currently use. So, providing support on social media builds channel consistency. It helps attract new customers and retain the existing ones.
• Improved customer engagement: Social media empowers brands to maintain timely and personalized interactions. Businesses can deepen relationships with customers and create engagement.
• Access to the global markets: Geographical boundaries blur on social platforms, offering a seamless way to interact with international clients.
• Real-time customer feedback: The constant flow of comments, likes, and shares serves as immediate performance indicators for your products or campaigns.
• Enhanced market research: Social listening tools make it easier to understand customer preferences and emerging market trends.
• A sense of belonging: Social media enables brands to establish customer groups. Businesses can encourage communication among customers by making individuals feel part of a brand community.
• Cost effectiveness: Compared to traditional support channels like phone, social media support is usually less expensive to operate.

The cons of social media as a support channel

There are also potential drawbacks associated with the implementation of social media as a support channel. Here are some of its cons.

• Platform diversity challenges: Managing multiple social media at the same time without a proper tool to bring all communication to the same dashboard can be complex and may lead to inconsistency in service quality.
• Timezone-related issues: The inability to hide the ‘Send message’ button outside office hours can lead to delayed responses and frustrated consumers.
• Resource intensive: Maintaining an active social media presence and support requires dedicated staff for consistent monitoring and engagement.
• Requires immediate attention: The real-time nature of social media demands prompt responses to customer queries or complaints.
• Risk of negative interactions: Social platforms can expose your brand to various risks, such as public shaming, trolling, or harassment.
• Ever-changing rules: Algorithm updates and new platform features require continuous adjustments to your support strategy.
• Limited control over conversations: When communication happens in a public thread, it can be shared and interpreted in many ways. This is usually beyond the brand’s control.

Social media customer service best practices

Follow these tips to overcome the above-mentioned challenges and turn customers into brand advocates.

1. Define your social media support policy

Without a clearly defined policy, there’s room for inconsistency, missteps, and misalignment in handling customer support on social media. A uniform policy ensures that every team member knows the procedures and guidelines.

Pro tips:

• Document your social media customer service policy detailing the guidelines for engagement, response time, escalation rules, and so on
• Train all team members and ensure that the policy is easily accessible

2. Identify social media support teams, roles, and procedures

There are different scenarios when it comes to handling social media customer support. It can be outsourced or done in-house by your call center team or a dedicated social media support team.

If you opt for assigning your team to the task, proper management is essential for leveling up performance. Clearly defined roles avoid overlaps and gaps in customer service.

Pro tips:

• Identify different roles such as customer service representatives, team leads, and social media managers
• Define the scope of responsibilities for each role 
• Create a workflow outlining how inquiries are to be handled, escalated, and followed up on
• Ensure every team member is trained on these procedures

3. Practice social listening

Social listening goes beyond mere monitoring. It’s about analyzing the conversations around your brand and industry. This can help you gain insights into customer needs, opinions, and pain points. So you can proactively address issues and seize opportunities.

Pro tips:

• Use social listening tools such as Mention or Brand24 to capture what people are saying about your brand, products, and the industry at large
• Analyze the data to discover trends, sentiments, and areas that need attention
• Adapt your customer service and marketing strategies accordingly

Image source: Brand24.com

4. Never ignore a customer inquiry

Ignoring a customer inquiry, no matter how trivial it may seem, can lead to negative perceptions about your brand’s customer service. This may even escalate to more public forms of dissatisfaction.

Pro tips:

• Train your customer service team to acknowledge every customer interaction, even if it’s just a simple “Thank you for reaching out.”
• Ensure your responses, like “We’re looking into your concern,” convey that the brand is actively addressing the issue and values the customer’s feedback

Image source: Airbnb Instagram page

5. Respond promptly

Quick responses are a cornerstone of effective customer service on social media platforms. Failure to deliver can lead to negative reviews and loss of customer trust.

Pro tips:

• Utilize an omnichannel messenger platform to monitor mentions, comments, and direct messages
• Aim at providing a response within an hour, even if it’s a holding statement saying you’re looking into the issue

6. Be personal

With 71% of consumers expecting to receive personalized interactions, they are no longer a luxury. Personalization fosters a deeper emotional connection, which is key to building brand loyalty.

Pro tips:

• Train your customer service team to always use the customer’s first name during interactions
• Ensure the team refers to any previous purchases or interactions to make the conversation more relevant and tailored

Image source: Best Buy Support X page

7. Use a friendly tone of voice

Intonation and tone can often be lost in text, so it’s important to maintain a friendly voice to put your customer at ease. A positive tone can turn potential negative situations around.

Pro tips:

• Don’t shy away from using emojis to convey tone more effectively
• Train your team to empathize with the customers

Image source: Mango Instagram page

8. Solve customer issues in a timely and effective manner

Offering the right solutions is vital for providing good customer service. It shows your brand doesn’t just acknowledge problems but actively works to resolve them.

Pro tips:

• After acknowledging the problem, offer clear steps for resolution
• Whenever possible, exceed the customer’s expectations in the solution you provide

Image source: Nike Instagram page

9. Adapt your approach to the changing trends

Social media landscapes are ever-evolving. An ‘always improving’ approach helps you adapt and meet changing customer needs.

Pro tips:

• Make it a regular practice to gather customer feedback, conduct surveys, and review key performance indicators (KPIs) like response time and customer satisfaction scores
• Use this data to continually refine your social media support strategy

10. Prioritize inquiries and responses

Not all comments require the same level of urgency. Knowing how to prioritize can make your customer service more effective.

Pro tips:

• Develop a priority system for handling comments
• Utilize a customer service platform to separate tasks into categories such as ‘Urgent’, ‘Requires follow-up’, and ‘General engagement’

11. Implement canned responses and chatbots for basic inquiries

As the volume of customer inquiries increases, it becomes challenging to maintain prompt and consistent responses. Preparing for frequently asked questions can dramatically speed up your response time and ensure consistency in your answers. 

The automation of customer service can improve social media support activities dramatically. Chatbots can handle straightforward issues, freeing human agents to deal with more complex concerns.

Pro tips:

• Develop a robust FAQ section and create canned responses for common queries (especially for initial responses)
• Implement a chatbot that can efficiently deal with common queries like order status, product information, or store hours
• Make sure the bot also has the functionality to hand off more complex queries to a human agent seamlessly

Image source: PayPal Facebook page

12. Route customers to your own support channel

A separate channel specifically for customer support (like a company help center or  a customer-facing knowledge base) helps to keep your main social media page clutter-free and makes it easier for customers to find help.

Pro tips:

• Direct your customers from the main social media page to your dedicated support channel
• Clearly advertise it in your social media bios and pinned posts

Image source: Apple X page

13. Streamline the support processes via integrated tools

Efficiency in responding to queries is crucial for positive customer service experiences. As your brand grows, the complexity and volume of customer queries will increase, which will necessitate a 360^° customer communication overview. This ensures all conversations are brought to a single dashboard, irrespective of the channel the customer uses.

Pro tips:

• Utilize a unified dashboard for all customer service inquiries across social platforms along with the other regular support channels, such as phone, email, and SMS
• Assign specific queries to respective team members skilled in resolving those issues
• Invest in advanced customer service software with capabilities like ticketing, multi-channel support, categorization, collaboration features, automation and analytics

14. Stay alert

In the social media world, a minor issue can quickly snowball into a major crisis if left unattended. Monitoring keeps your finger on the pulse of public opinion.

Pro tips:

• Use platforms like Awario, Hootsuite, or Sprout Social to monitor mentions of your brand name or related keywords on social media
• Stay proactive by setting up alerts for these mentions, allowing for immediate handling of potential issues

Image source: Awario.com

Social media support mistakes to avoid

Let’s discover the potential pitfalls of offering social media support.

Communication mistakes

• Inconsistent communication: Avoid using different tones across platforms. Maintain consistency by utilizing a style guide for your team.
• Being too formal: Avoid sounding robotic in your communication. Customers value a human touch. Use conversational language and add personality to your responses.
• Inauthentic apologies or getting defensive: Avoid generic apologies and defensive responses. When a customer complains, thank them for their feedback. Express genuine remorse and offer a solution.
• Replying individually during outages: Avoid individual replies during events like outages. Instead, issue public status updates to maintain clear communication.

Timing-related mistakes

• Ignoring customer queries: Never overlook direct support questions. Make sure every question is answered promptly.
• Slow responses: Avoid slow responses at all costs on social media. Consumers expect quick replies. Assign a dedicated team or use automation to meet these expectations.

Process-related mistakes

• Failing to take it offline: Avoid creating a big fuss over a customer issue on social media. For complex or sensitive issues, guide the conversation to a private channel like email or phone.
• Deleting negative customer feedback: Except for spam or violations, never delete negative comments. It worsens the customer relationship and harms your brand.
• Information overload: Avoid overloading customers with too many messages. Stick to answering the customer’s specific query. If complex, suggest transitioning to another channel like email.
• Not measuring performance: Never overlook the importance of analytics. Without metrics, improvement is a guessing game. Set goals and track your performance to adapt and improve continuously.

Social media customer service software

We’ve already mentioned some of the best social media support tools. Let’s discuss them in more detail.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a comprehensive platform that offers various features catering to social media management and customer service. It allows for scheduling posts, real-time social media monitoring, and analytics. For customer service, it provides a unified inbox to manage all customer interactions from multiple social media platforms in one place.

Image source: Hootsuite.com

Advanced filters can sort mentions by keyword, hashtag, and customer sentiment, making it easier for service reps to prioritize responses. While it offers extensive features, the user interface can be somewhat complicated for beginners. It also offers additional capabilities around digital marketing automation and customer relationship management (CRM).

Sprout Social

Sprout Social is another robust platform that offers an all-in-one solution for social media management. It excels in analytics and reporting, giving businesses a deep insight into their social media performance. Its Smart Inbox brings messages from all social channels into a single stream, thereby making customer interaction seamless.

Image source: Sprout Social

The platform even has CRM features that allow businesses to create and maintain customer profiles. One of its strongest suits is its user-friendly interface. It’s an Editors’ Choice winner for its well-rounded feature set and ease of use, but it may be a bit pricey for small businesses.

Brand24

Brand24 specializes in social media analytics and listening. It offers robust analytics features that help businesses monitor mentions, sentiment, and influencer engagement. Slack integration allows agents to collaborate efficiently. The tool is well-suited for small to midsize busineIsses (SMBs) due to its affordable pricing tiers and friendly user interface.

Image source: Brand24.com

However, Brand24 falls a bit short when it comes to social content creation and can only archive a year’s worth of social data. While it is not as feature-rich as Hootsuite and Sprout Social in terms of CRM and digital marketing automation, it offers specialized functionalities for monitoring social media mentions and interactions.

Boost customer care services on social media

With the constantly evolving customer expectations, enhancing your customer service through social media platforms is not just an option but a necessity. With tools like Hootsuite, Sprout Social, and Brand24, you can integrate your customer service channels, analyze social interactions, and promptly respond to customer queries. 

Moreover, customer service platforms like Touchpoint facilitate social media support. They provide specialized customer interaction integrations with WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. These integrations enable seamless communication with your customer base, ensuring that your company remains agile and responsive.

Leveraging top-notch tools for social media support effectively can give you a critical edge in customer satisfaction and brand loyalty. This is a strategic move for any business looking to excel in customer care.