Two-Way Social Media Conversations in Contact Centers

Providing customer service on social media is an absolute must for any business that wants to survive the fierce competition. Why? Because 1 in every 3 customers prefer to turn to social media to seek advice or communicate with a business. It’s no surprise that most contact centers have already incorporated social media into their channels of communication.

And while most businesses manage to communicate with their customers through social media, they often miss out on establishing a conversation with them.

Having a conversation will allow you to truly understand how your customers perceive your brand and therefore enable you to offer them a personalized solution.

Let’s see how you can nail two-way social media conversations in your contact center!

Step one: Create a Strategy

There are several social media channels out there, but it’s not likely that you need to be present on all of them. Remember, sometimes less is more: instead of trying to provide customer service on all the social channels out there, try and concentrate on providing quality service only on the channels your customers are actually using.

Consider the following things before you launch your social customer service:

1. Which channels are your customers’ preferences?
2. When will you provide social service for them? During business hours? 24/7? Make sure to decide on one option, and clearly communicate it to your customers! A little this and that will not work out in the long run.
3. Define service level: how quickly will your respond to your customers’ queries? Which queries will be the most urgent to take care of? How will you prioritize them?

These are all important questions that you need to create a process for before launching your social service in case you want it to work smoothly in the long run.

Step Two: Plan Workforce

Once you established the basics for your social service, let’s focus on what’s the most important: two-way social media conversations.

In order to establish valuable conversations with your customers, you need to put the right people there to take care of your social queries. The best is if you hire a specific workforce who only deal with social media conversations. Otherwise, your operators might prioritize other types of contacts (for example phone calls) over social media messages.

Also, provide your agents with all the necessary information on customers and products they need in order to do their job effectively. Consider to create a knowledge base and guidelines and make it easily accessible to agents so that they can reply in no time.

But, as we already said, replying won’t be enough, you’ll also need to listen to what they say. Listening to your customers’ opinions on social sites will provide you with some of the most important information, particularly in terms of product development. After all, it is customers who use your services. 

Step Three: Choose the Right Tool

Another important rule of effective two-way social service is to choose and use the right tool. First of all, tracking and monitoring the volume of your incoming queries is essential, as it will not only allow you to manage them in a timely manner but also help you plan your staffing responsible for social media messages.

You can easily keep track of your social inquiries by relying on contact center software that can be integrated with your social media channels. Our system, VCC Live, can be integrated with Facebook Messenger, the world’s most used social network, with only one click. This way, your agents will be able to handle your customers’ Facebook messages directly in your customer service system. As simple as that!

Hopefully, this article helped you start establishing two-way social media conversations, and you’ve managed to pick up some essential strategies for providing efficient support your channels! Good luck!