Choo Choo: How to get on the social customer care train

Today’s B2B customers feel empowered. They demand a whole new level of customer focus, expecting companies to know them, recognize their challenges, and cater to their needs. While this may seem like a challenging task, it isn’t. The majority of your customers (nearly 70%) are already connecting and speaking with you via social media. Your younger customers are more likely to use social media for service interactions (i.e., seeking answers and support) than for marketing purposes. This presents a growing and exciting opportunity to get on board with social customer care.

What is social customer care?

Social customer care is about embracing social media as more than a marketing channel. It focuses on delivering immediate and personalized customer interactions across multiple social networks. And it doesn’t require a lot of manpower or a large budget. Having a formal customer care plan on social media can dramatically reduce overhead costs and improve the lifetime value of your customers. Solving a customer issue on social media costs nearly 1/6th of the cost of a call center interaction (or hiring a team of customer service professionals). Additionally, customers who experience positive social customer care are nearly 3X more likely to recommend that company.

To get a ride with the social customer care train, you must understand and implement the following elements:  

3 key aspects of social customer care

1. Customer care for proactive & reactive support

When customers reach out to you on social media—whether to complain, offer feedback, or ask for support—they expect a response within an hour. Failing to meet this expectation will result in a disappointing customer experience. 19% of customers who don’t get a response at all are also less likely to recommend your product or service to others. In other words, by letting tweets, Facebook posts, or direct messages go unnoticed, you’re essentially leading customers to devalue your entire customer service efforts. This is why addressing social media issues promptly is the key to maintaining customer satisfaction and earning their trust and commitment.

With Oktopost’s social customer care solution, you can be proactive by ensuring that even the most minor problems are resolved before they escalate, instead of having to log into each social network to discover who said what, Oktopost brings all of your mentions, comments, and messages into one place for efficient and scalable customer support.

2. Customer care for personalized conversations

Providing immediate responses isn’t enough. To completely immerse your customers in a positive experience, you must take social customer care a step further by providing personalized interactions. In this sense, every B2B customer should be treated individually by a relevant customer care representative. For example, if a customer is asking you a technical question, it should be handled by one of your product or development team members. Therefore, social customer care goes beyond the hands of marketing and customer success. It is a company-wide strategy that empowers everyone to work together to provide the best possible response seamlessly.

The Oktopost ‘Assignments’ feature makes it easy for employees to collaborate and communicate with customers on a more 1:1 level. Simply by assigning social conversations to appropriate members and seeing which employees are online, you can ensure that every interaction comes from the right person at the right time. Not to mention, employees gain a detailed history of every social conversation. This provides them with additional context on how customer inquiries were handled—and by whom—to gain a deeper understanding of customer relationships.

3. Customer care for long-term relationships

To develop long-term relationships with customers, it’s essential to understand all the different touchpoints they have had with your company, from initial contact to ongoing interactions. Customer care may begin on social media, but it doesn’t always end there. For example, your customer may have asked you for support on social media, visited your website, and later contacted your customer success manager directly. Seems like a long journey.

To track these interactions, you must connect them. In other words, create a constant flow of data between social customer care and your other customer relationship platforms, such as Salesforce, to paint a complete picture of your customer journeys over a long period. This will help you understand your customers’ needs and foster lasting, fruitful relationships with them.

Hop on!

Your customers love social media because they can connect directly with you at any given moment. It’s time to exceed their expectations by getting on board with social customer care at this early stage. With Oktopost’s B2B social media management platform, you can create a formal social care strategy that focuses on well-timed, personalized, and committed interactions that strengthen your existing customer relationships.