8 Tips for Social Media Customer Service

Did you know that 60 percent of questions or comments posted on a brand’s Facebook page will never receive a response? 42 percent of consumers expect a response within one hour, and 32 percent expect a response within 30 minutes.

With this expectation, you have to be prepared to perform social customer service duties if you’ve been tasked with monitoring and managing social media, either for your own brand or for a client. Taking on social media customer service can be a daunting task, but fear not — here are a few tips to get you started.

Develop a Strategy

Before you tackle social media customer service, there are several questions you need to ask:

• What types of posts will we engage with? What types will we not?
• What common questions will we receive? What are the answers?
• What questions won’t we answer?
• What do we do if someone accuses our company of illegal activity?
• If we don’t know the answer, whom should we go to for help?

Arm yourself for success by having the answers to these questions before they come up. You’ll save yourself time, energy, stress and a potential public relations nightmare.

Be Responsive

People expect a fast response on social media, so it’s important that you respond as quickly as possible – but within reason. If you have other work and projects, it might not be feasible for you to handle customer service inquiries within an hour. Work with your team to determine how fast you should aim to answer inquires. Our recommendation is within 24 hours.

But, always set limits. Which brings us to our next point.

Have “Business Hours”

If your hours of operation are from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. eastern time, then that’s when you should be tending to social. Since your Facebook page will more than likely be attached to your personal account, it can be hard to ignore those pesky notifications. Don’t risk burnout by answering customer service queries at all hours of the day and night.

However, if your field or industry requires 24/7 social monitoring, make sure you have a whole team on deck to handle it. Divvy up responsibilities and create a shift schedule to ensure someone is always ready to respond.

Personalize Your Responses

Try and stay away from canned or copied-and-pasted responses as much as you can. Customers want to know that your company cares about them and their opinions. Even if you have to post a similar response every time, personalize the post by using the customer’s name and the details of the request. For example:

Customer Katie was visiting one of your restaurants and posted on your Facebook wall that she had a rude waiter in your Atlanta location. There are two ways you can respond:

Option 1: “We’re sorry to hear this. Please fill out this form to help us improve our customer service.”

Option 2: “Hi Katie! We’re so sorry to hear you experienced poor service in our Atlanta location. Would you mind sending us your phone number or a more detailed email? We would love to hear more about the problem so we can work with our team to correct it.”

Option 1 sounds like a response that you could copy and paste over and over again, and would probably make your customer feel like a real person is not seeing or attending to their compliant. Option 2, while essentially saying the same thing, adds a level of personalization and demonstrates to the customer that your company really does care about their concerns and wants to help them.

Track and Report

The only way to get better is to track and report on your results to see what is and isn’t working. Having a solid system for logging customer inquiries and your responses to them will help you keep track of which cases you can close and which ones you need to follow up with. This will also save you time when it comes to reporting – all the data will be organized and ready for you to analyze.

Follow Though

Actions speak louder than words, so if you tell the customer you will be sending their complaint on to the appropriate department, do it! Ideally, you should be sending the complaint as soon as possible after you receive it. Once it’s been sent, your job might be done. But, be sure to note if you need to do any follow-up with the customer yourself.

A Note About Hiding or Deleting Public Posts

In general, you should never hide a post on your company page. But, there are exceptions to every rule. Posts that contain inappropriate language or attack another person by name should be hidden or deleted if they are publicly displayed. Hiding these posts doesn’t mean you shouldn’t address the issue – just handle the discussion in a private message or via email.

Interested in learning more about social media? Let us know how we can help, and in the mean time, download our sample social media editorial calendar to get your post timing squared away.

Updated: Apr 13, 2022