Social media has rapidly evolved to become an indispensable tool for customer service in the modern world. Customer service is now an integral part of any business. According to statistics, businesses can grow revenues between 4% and 8% above their market by prioritizing better customer service experiences Customers love when brands respond to complaints. They hate it when you ignore complaints, and they are likely to walk away or give bad reviews that might affect business.
To avoid ignoring customers’ complaints online, you can leverage a technique known as social listening. Social listening is a technique where you monitor, track and analyze mentions, hashtags and the reputation of your brand online. Social listening allows brands to respond to queries/complaints/conversations on social media on time. This includes those untagged mentions.
Social listening has plenty of benefits. It helps create loyalty, creates brand ambassadors, attracts new customers, gives brands a competitive advantage, and promotes real-time engagement.
So how do you use social listening to improve customer service? Here are ways to use social listening for customer service as a brand:
1. Choose specific social media channels to listen to
Many social media channels can be used to provide customer service. However, different channels appeal differently to customers. You cannot concentrate on every social media channel. Therefore, you need to decide which channels you will invest your energy, time, and resources.
While it might not be a walk into the park, it is highly recommended that you choose those channels that harbour most of your active customers and not necessarily the top social media platforms. “You need to look at your social media analytics and know the platforms that most of your customers use more. This will help you gauge and know which platforms to use for your customer service,” says Egline Samoei, a digital marketing specialist and Co-founder of Brand Moran.
Also, Kenya’s social media landscape 2020 by USIU demographic data has proved invaluable insights in choosing the right social networks to engage your consumers better.
2. Choose a good social listening tool
You can make use of Google’s free social listening tool known as Google alerts to get free web mentions. However, setting up Google Alerts mentions is not enough if you want to get extensive reports of how and what people are talking about your brand online.
With the enormous social media conversations and various social media channels, finding every mention about your brand using these basic methods is difficult. Fortunately, various dedicated social listening tools simplify this task. These tools use powerful algorithms to scan and retrieve mentions about your brand across various platforms.
For comprehensive and effective social listening, consider using an enterprise level social listening tool like Brand Moran. This tool lets you find out what people are saying about your brand on Twitter, Instagram and hundreds of local blogs and the most popular dailies.
All you need to do is create a project tab, enter brand keywords and hashtags you want to track, and then pick the news sites. This tool will then give you real-time alerts and reports of your mentions and sentiment analysis.
3. Choose what to track
Once you have established social media platforms to listen to and social listening tools to use, you need to know what to track. Depending on the objective of the social listening strategy, you can choose to:
- Track brand mentions
- Track brand keywords and hashtags
- Monitor customer feedback and complaints
- Track Industry trends and buzzwords
- Monitor how influencers are engaging with your brand or that of a competitor.
4. Turn on Alerts
See, as much as you want to provide prompt customer service on digital platforms, you cannot stay glued to your screen waiting for customers’ complaints or concerns. On the contrary, you need to respond faster when anything about your brand hits the screen. Now, here is where turning on alerts on a social media listening tool comes into play.
You need to turn on alerts so that you don’t want to miss a conversation about your product. Fortunately, social media sites give an option to set up alerts and updates.
For a platform like Brand Moran, you can turn on alerts for the brand mentions or keywords when creating a project. From there, you can configure a real-time SMS alert if there is a brand mention on social media, blogs, or local news sites.
5. Have a customer service handle
To ace it with customer service, you might need to set up a customer service handle. Depending on your business, customers might flock online to raise complaints, give feedback about brands. This will not go well if you are sending out brand posts and customers reply with complaints. Therefore, it is vital to have a dedicated handle for customer support.
A good example is the way Kenya Power has a handle dedicated for complaints and queries.
Some other brands that have customer service are Safaricom; Safaricom care, KRA; KRA care among others. With this customer service handle, you need to stay proactive and acknowledge feedback.
Hi Kamau. Kindly note, your service request has been addressed. Kindly check your DM. ^LK
— KRA Care (@KRACare) September 16, 2021
6. Respond to customer requests
Naturally, people aren’t happy when their request goes unanswered. This also applies to customers. When a customer leaves a question or comments about your brand, try to respond as fast and possible.
According to Statista 48% of consumers expect a response to social media questions and complaints within 24 hours, while 18% expect an instant response on social media. So, if you neglect these figures, you are brewing disaster for your brand. If for any reason you fail to respond quickly, acknowledge the mistake to your customer and promise to improve your response speed.
Speed of response is therefore paramount and is among the things you need to know about customer service. Generally, responding within 60 minutes is good for your brand.
7. Monitor your progress
It is natural to evaluate a technique used in business and social listening is not an exception. You need to measure the performance and rate it on a scale to determine whether you are going in the right direction or not. What is the response rate? How many issues have you resolved? The number of inquiries resolved among others. This way, you can identify the loopholes and mend the mishaps before things turn inside out.
A good evolution technique brings to board both your objectives and KPIs. This would be followed by qualitative and quantitative feedback. Once you have monitored your progress, you can easily develop the best way to respond and engage your customers.
Conclusion
We hope this article has given you crystal clear guidance regarding the best ways to use social listening for customer service. Put them into practice and take your customer service to incredible heights.
You can now leverage the power of social listening in Kenya, thanks to Brand Moran Social Media Intelligence Tool. Talk to us via info@brandmoran.com or call +254715770977 to unlock lots of social listening benefits for your business, today!
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