How to Deliver Exceptional Customer Care on Social

What is social customer care and why should you care?

Social customer care is the practice of providing customer service and support through social media platforms. This means having a dedicated team that responds to and resolves customer inquiries that come in through comments or private messages on social media platforms such as Facebook or TikTok.

Businesses that offer great social customer care have social media as a key channel in their customer care strategy – it’s not just something the social media marketing team take care of in a vacuum. Ideally, it not only provides an additional channel for brands and customers to engage with each other but also increases brand trust and customer loyalty.

With 5.17 billion social media users worldwide, social media platforms are a place where many customers connect with others and learn more about brands. As a business, you need to provide customer service where your customers are, and your customers will expect your social media channels to be a touchpoint for them to contact you when they have an issue or feedback.

Brands that don't offer customer service on social are missing an opportunity to engage with customers in a faster, more personal way and may ultimately lose custom. According to McKinsey, companies that don't respond to customers on social media have a 15% higher churn rate than those that do. And according to the same study, consumers who receive a response to their social media queries tend to spend 20% to 40% more than consumers who don't receive a response.

A unique feature of social media is the ability to engage with customers in real time. Brands that provide customer service on social can often respond faster than through other channels.

Another unique characteristic is public visibility. Social media is the only place where customer service is open to everyone to witness. This gives your brand the chance to go viral for good reasons, but also carries the risk of a bad interaction turning into a crisis.

Personalization is another helpful quality that comes along with using social for customer care. The social media profiles of customers who reach out to you on social, or tag you in their posts, can provide valuable information that gives you an idea of who they are. With this insight, you can craft a much more personalized response than through other customer service channels. 

The benefits and challenges of social customer care

As with everything, there are two sides to social customer care. While the benefits outweigh the challenges, you and your team need to be aware of both to run a successful social customer care program.

First, let's take a look at the benefits of social customer care. 

The benefits of social customer care

• Customer satisfaction and loyalty: Providing exceptional customer service on social increases customer satisfaction and loyalty. 
• Increased visibility and reach: Because of the public nature of social, when you reply and respond to public comments and posts, you have the opportunity to be seen by far more people than your followers, with the potential to go viral. After a customer complained about a jacket from The North Face on her TikTok account, the brand quickly reached out to her and turned the issue into a marketing campaign that went viral. 
• Cost effectiveness: By offering customer service on social, you may be able to reduce the cost of other customer service channels. 
• Valuable consumer insights: Not only can you get helpful information from a customer through their social profile, but you can also analyze a broad range of online conversation data to get a clearer picture of your customers and the questions they’re asking to identify common themes.
• Positive brand image and reputation: When you engage with your customers on social in a timely manner, they feel that your brand is there for them and that social is effectively an “open door”. This can increase positive perceptions and make customers more likely to recommend your brand to their friends and family. 

The challenges of social customer care

• Consumers expect a quick response: When consumers engage with brands on social media platforms, they don't think of the brand as a business, but as a social media user. When they send a message, they expect a fast response. This is a challenge for brands, as McKinsey found that nearly 80% of customers expect a response within a day, but only half of companies meet this expectation. 
• It's out in public: This can be both an opportunity and a challenge. It's out in the open and, depending on your reach, it can spread like wildfire. This can be amplified if an influencer with greater reach decides to jump in and your response or the issue itself goes viral. If your company doesn't live up to expectations, the situation can turn into a crisis. 
• Every social media platform is different: So far, we've talked about social media as a broad term, but each social media platform has its own unique characteristics and there's no one-size-fits-all approach. While you may communicate more formally on LinkedIn, you may respond in a more casual tone on TikTok. You'll need to make sure your team are trained for the different social environments they may be interacting on.
• Sudden increase in requests: It's very difficult to predict how many requests you'll get through social. You may be able to calculate your average requests and break them down by day or even time of day which will give you a good idea, but you should be prepared for a surge in requests. Social customer care teams should be notified of major events, such as product launches, so they aren't overwhelmed by a sudden spike in activity. 
• Social customer care responsibilities: When it comes to social customer care, team responsibilities aren't always clear cut. On the one hand, you have your customer care team, who are experts in problem solving and know your products and services inside and out. On the other hand, you have your social media team, who are experts at engaging with consumers on social. A good process is needed for dealing with different kinds of requests. 
• Supporting tech: Another challenge is deciding what supporting software you need to provide excellent customer service on social. Managing multiple social platforms natively can get messy and overwhelming if you have to constantly switch between them. With social media management tools like Brandwatch's, you can have all your social media streams in one interface, analyze key metrics, and organize your workflows. Meanwhile, new AI technologies can help you answer common questions on a large scale and improve your response times. Ideally, you'll want an SMM tool that will scale with your business.

The social customer care framework: Building a stellar strategy

The foundation of providing excellent customer service on social is a social customer care strategy. A well-defined strategy can help you stay on track with your goals, clearly understand responsibilities and workflows, and measure the success of your customer care initiatives.

Without a social customer service strategy:  

• Your team doesn't have a clear understanding of your goals and objectives. 
• Responsibilities aren't defined across teams, which can lead to unresolved issues and customer frustration.
• You don't have clear metrics to measure your performance with, so you don't know what areas need improvement.
• You risk being outperformed by your competitors and losing customers.

Fear not, we have created a social customer care framework that will help you build a solid strategy in no time. If you already have a strategy in place, now might be a good time to use this framework to review what you're already doing and see if there's anything missing.   

We have broken the social customer care framework into five steps:  

1. Gathering posts, comments, messages 
2. Allocating requests and assigning responsibilities 
3. Monitoring mentions and spikes 
4. Mitigating future issues 
5. Measuring success

Let's take a closer look at each step. 

Step 1: Gathering posts, comments, messages

Choosing social platforms for customer service

The first step is to decide which platforms you want to offer customer service on. Ideally, you should be on the main platforms your customers use. Analyzing where your brand is getting the most DMs and mentions is an easy place to start here.

Defining response windows

The next step is to decide on your response windows. Will you offer a 24/7 support window or only during business hours? This will depend on the resources you have available. You should also consider different time zones if your business is global. Communicate your service hours to your customers, perhaps in your bio or in an automated reply, to set expectations.

Setting the tone of voice

Third, consider your tone of voice. You've already decided which platforms you want to use, so this will influence how you approach customer inquiries. If you are new to the platform, get an understanding of whether the tone is more formal or lighthearted, and use analytics to get a better picture of your followers.

Creating a workflow

Finally, create a workflow. A seamless workflow is critical to providing excellent customer service. To make sense of the stream of requests you get from different social media channels, you can cluster them into different categories that help you get a sense of what type of requests they are, their urgency, and their complexity. For example, you can cluster requests by urgency level, location, topic, or complexity. This helps you assign them to the right team member more quickly. Of course, you’ll need a comprehensive social media management tool that can keep up with all this. 

Step 2: Allocating requests and assigning responsibilities 

Now it's time to decide who should handle the inquiries. Should it be the social media manager who knows the social media platform inside out and how to respond to the customer in the right tone, or the customer service manager who has excellent knowledge of all your products and services?

There's no one-size-fits-all approach that works for all businesses. If you have a dedicated social media team and a customer service team, a hybrid approach may be the way to get the best results.

The social media team is usually the team that monitors these online inquiries, and they can triage which ones they can easily answer themselves and which ones should be referred to the customer service team. This requires some basic training for the social media team so they can answer common questions. They are the first point of contact and can navigate between the customer and the customer service team for more complex issues.

AI technologies can help your social media team respond to inquiries faster and even make them more personalized. For common questions, you can save time by creating templates so you don't have to write the same answer over and over again.

A great social media management tool will help you automate the clustering of inquiries and automatically assign them to the right person.

Step 3: Monitoring mentions and spikes

The first two steps focused on the conversations associated with your social media channels, but don't stop there. Customers are also talking about your brand online on other social media platforms and the broader web. If you are not monitoring these conversations, you are missing out on valuable insights that can inform your customer care strategy.

With social listening tools like Brandwatch, you can stay on top of the latest conversations about your brand, products, and industry to see what's causing spikes in mentions, where they're happening, and what the sentiment is. You can even set up alerts to let you know when there is a spike in conversations so you can jump on opportunities or challenges before it's too late.

Step 4: Mitigating future issues

There are several things you can do to mitigate future problems. For example, you could provide:

• A 'Frequently Asked Questions' (FAQ) page on your website that’s informed by common questions on social 
• A dedicated help center that goes into more detail on popular topics 
• Educational videos that speak to common pain points 
• Customer testimonials that include best practices 
• Aawareness campaigns that answer common questions and help build customer trust  
• A community portal that can help customers find others with similar challenges and get to a fast solution   

All of these can help reduce customer frustration by providing solutions quick while reducing strain on your customer service team. 

Step 5: Measuring success 

Finally, no strategy is complete without measuring success. You want to know how your initiatives are paying off and whether you are achieving your goals, as well as if there’s room for improvement.

There are a variety of metrics you can choose from to measure the performance of your social customer care efforts: 

• First response time (FRT): FRT measures how long it takes your team to respond to a request.  
• Average resolution time (ART): This is the average time it takes your team to resolve a request.  
• Escalation rate: The escalation rate represents the percentage of requests that are passed on to a higher level of support such as the customer service team.  
• Customer satisfaction score (CSAT): Measures how satisfied customers are with your services. Typically measured by collecting customer feedback on a scale of 1 to 5. 
• Net promoter score (NPS): NPS is a customer loyalty metric that measures how likely customers are to recommend your company to their friends and family. 
• Customer effort score (CES): Like NPS and CSAT, it can be part of a customer satisfaction survey, gathering feedback on how easy it was for customers to contact your social customer service. 

You don't need to measure all of them. The metrics that are most helpful to you will be the ones that help you measure against your goals and take action to improve things. A combination of qualitative and quantitative metrics is a good way to get an overview of your performance.

One metric we recommend measuring is ART (average resolution time). This metric gives you an idea of how long it takes your team to resolve requests. There could be a big opportunity here to improve and outperform competitors. Given the gap between what consumers expect and what companies deliver, reducing ART can have a huge impact on customer satisfaction.  

Social customer care in practice  

Now that you have the framework for a solid social customer care strategy, it's time to put it into practice. Here are some quick tips for improving your customer service on social. 

Provide a dedicated social channel for customer service  

For a brand that receives a lot of social media messages and comments, it can quickly become overwhelming to manage everything from the same social media account. Having a dedicated social media account for customer inquiries can help keep tricky questions off your more visible channels, speed up response time, and it's clear to customers where to go when they need help. Don't forget to add your customer service hours to set expectations.   

Lyft, for example, has a dedicated customer service account on X: 

Be proactive

Being great at social customer care is to be proactive when a problem arises, not wait for customers to contact you. Use your social media channels to let your customers know that you're aware of the issue, that you're working on it, and that you'll provide regular updates. By communicating transparently, you can show your customers that you care, which can have a positive impact on your brand image and trust.

When Rei discovered an issue with their kids' bike, they made a proactive Instagram post to let their customers know about the problem: 

Personalize 

As mentioned earlier in this guide, a good social media management tool can provide you with valuable information about the customer, and you can use this insight to add a personal touch to your response. Even if you're just going by the customer's profile, using their name and preferred language is a good start.

Pet food retailer Chewy takes a personal tone when responding to messages, mentioning the owner's or pet's name to show that they care about their two- and four-legged customers. In one example we found, Chewy's social media team sent condolences to the owners of a pet who had recently passed, offering support via their DMs.

Turn negative feedback into engagement 

Turning negative feedback into engagement is one of the hardest things to do but, when done right, it can deepen your relationship with your customers. By openly acknowledging and highlighting your brand's weaknesses, you can appear more authentic and relatable.

When clothing brand Everlane came across negative feedback from a customer on X (formerly Twitter), they seized the opportunity by answering it publicly on their Instagram account: 

How Brandwatch can help you take your social customer service to the next level

Brandwatch's social media management suite offers several features that can help you improve your social customer service and save time and resources. Here are four examples of how Brandwatch can help you take your social customer care to the next level.

1. Engage 

Our Engage tool is, you guessed it, all about engagement – so it's an obvious choice for your customer service efforts. With Engage, you gather all your different social media streams and messages in one inbox that you can customize. You can easily assign requests to the appropriate team and leave notes. You can also tag requests and run reports that give you insight into your team's performance. All that happens in one convenient interface. 

2. AI Iris writing assistant

Iris, our AI writing assistant, is also part of Engage and can make your customer service efforts much easier. Iris analyzes the context of messages and drafts a response for you. If you write it yourself, it gives you tips on how to improve your writing, from grammar to tone to adding emojis.

This not only saves you time but also increases the quality of your replies, which can help deepen relationships with your customers. 

3. Case management 

With Engage, you can easily manage cases and turn the interactions you have on social into cases. It gives you an overview of the urgency of the case, past interactions, and you can add profile cards.  

The case management feature helps ensure that everything is addressed and makes it much easier to collaborate with other teams, such as customer service. Engage also has an integration with Salesforce Service Cloud.

4. Social listening 

Finally, social listening that lets you monitor conversations happening online. Here you can analyze the sentiment behind mentions and see what is causing spikes in mention volume or sentiment.

You can also set up alerts to email you when there's a spike in mentions of your brand or a particular topic which can help you spot an emerging crisis before it's too late.