Through the years, social media websites have become something like a
popularity contest where all kinds of people and businesses battle it
out in order to get the most “likes”, “thumbs up”, “retweets”, or the
like. Social media marketing has become the next big thing, and it is
not a big surprise because of the sheer ease and convenience it offers.
Still, there are a lot of uses for social media even outside of
marketing, and with a little imagination, business owners can do wonders
with this tool— using social media websites as a venue for customer
service, for example.
Easy access. The internet has literally given us the
world at our fingertips. Because of this, people have turned into
info-hungry beasts, some of whom can’t bear to be away from Facebook or
Twitter for even just a few minutes and the
social media numbers
only increase as time passes. What better way, then, for you to zero in
on customer complaints and to get a chance to resolve conflict quickly
and efficiently? Bad news and reviews travel quickly in the world of
social media so if you can nip things in the bud before they turn nasty,
you’re good.
Integration with other media. In aWashington Post article,
Tweeting for Customer Service, Not Marketing,
it was explained that it is more advisable for you to only use social
media to reply to your customer’s concerns the first time. If any
further discussions are needed, you should be quick to take the
conversation offline, because the walls in Facebook or Twitter aren’t
the best venues for this. Reply once to show that you attend to concerns
promptly, and then see to your customer’s problems through another
medium.
No big audiences. There are several different
social media mistakes
and misconceptions people can believe in, but simple logic and common
sense will tell you that the more followers you have, the harder it is
to keep track of them all. It would be practically impossible to attend
to all customer concerns individually. The best option would be to have
consistent updates to address the most common problems that majority of
your customers face.
Social Media is a wonderful marketing tool and will only continue to
grow from there. It is important to remember, however, that it’s not all
there is to it. Social media has other uses too, and when it comes to
customer service, you are in for a big surprise.
