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Top 10 tools that help you handle customer service on social media

April 21, 2023

Providing customer service on social media may seem like a daunting task given that communicating with clients on these platforms can be more chaotic and unpredictable compared to phone calls or emails. And yet, customer expectations are super high: as much as 76% of US users expect brands to respond within 24 hours, while 13% of them want an answer within less than an hour.

This is why many companies already treat customer service on social media the same way as more traditional channels. Luckily, there are lots of software solutions to automate some tasks.

With the right tools in place, you can quickly handle queries submitted through social media, get in touch with potential and existing clients, quickly respond to brand mentions, make sure to reach your audience, plan valuable content for them, and so much more.

In this article, we present 10 tools that can help you better handle customer service through your social media platforms.

1. VCC Live for handling all communication channels in one place

VCC Live’s cloud contact center solution helps you manage many communication channels (including social media and chat apps) in one place to ensure fast issue resolution regardless of what channels customers choose to contact your business. Once you sync your social media profiles with VCC’s app, logging in to particular accounts is not needed. The platform also enables smooth collaboration for teams: you can manage tickets and transfer queries between agents.

Apart from handling communication directly in social media comments, VCC Live supports messaging apps such as Facebook Messenger, Instagram’s direct messaging function, Whatsapp, Viber and more. You can manage your email and SMS channels through this tool, too.

If your customers prefer more traditional ways of getting in touch, VCC Live has a wide range of features to support voice channels, such as automatic call distribution or an IVR system.

One of the key things your team can benefit from is adding metrics related to customer service on social to VCC Live’s customizable KPI dashboards. This means that you can have a better overview of your agents’ performance without compiling data from multiple sources.

Top benefits for customer service:

  • Handles all communication channels in one place
  • Integrates with various platforms (including chat apps)
  • Supports collaboration through ticketing
  • Tracks KPIs on customizable dashboard

Pricing:

  • On demand

Reviews:

Website:

https://vcc.live/

2. Help Scout for ticketing

Help Scout provides a central inbox for customer support requests, allowing you to efficiently manage and prioritize inquiries. The inbox is fully customizable: you can sort customer mails by priority and create separate inboxes for different teams. The tool also helps you create automatic workflows to solve simple issues, and use various collaboration features (such as private notes, assignments and collision detection) to deal with more complex ones.

Another useful feature is the knowledge base: by setting up a library of support articles, tutorials and FAQ, customers can find answers to common questions on their own. You can even learn about your customer’s needs with this feature as it tracks what they’re searching for and what percentage of them still reach out for help after consulting your knowledge base.

Top benefits for customer service:

  • Offers central inbox to see all emails
  • Prevents duplicate replies with collision detection
  • Creates reports on team efficiency and customer happiness
  • Builds a searchable knowledge base with useful statistics

Pricing:

  • starting at $20/month

Reviews:

Website:

https://www.helpscout.com/

3. Manychat to automate conversations

You can use Manychat as an interactive chatbot for Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and SMS. The tool allows you to use pre-built templates for fast implementation or to build your own automations to assist your customers in a tailored way.

On Facebook Messenger, Manychat can confirm orders, answer support questions and even book appointments and send reminders about them for your customers. On Instagram, the tool enables you to automatically reply to stories mentioning your brand – this feature may help with various goals, such as increasing reach, getting more interest or nurturing customer relationships. Other useful features include personalized SMS messages and automated responses on WhatsApp – on the latter platform, you can also send product or service updates after 24 hours to re-engage with customers you previously interacted with.

With integrations such as Google Sheets, MailChimp and HubSpot, Manychat keeps track of your customer interactions in an organized way.

Top benefits for customer service:

  • Delivers instant support to customers
  • Provides automated messaging on various platforms
  • Notifies agents when their assistance is needed
  • Offers automated responses for comments as well

Pricing:

  • Free plan
  • Paid plan starting at $15/month

Reviews:

Website:

https://manychat.com/

4. Crowdsignal to capture customer feedback

Crowdsignal helps you create surveys, polls, quizzes and forms with various question types. In addition, you can customize the color, font, and even the URL of the survey. To avoid double voting and spam, you can set email restrictions, passwords or Captcha protection. Crowdsignal surveys can be shared or embedded anywhere, so you can reach your customers on all platforms.

Once data is collected, Crowdsignal helps you manage it in various ways: you can track answers by location, export results in multiple formats or connect it to Google Sheets.

Top benefits for customer service:

  • Helps you manage all surveys in one place
  • Lets you attach five-star and thumbs up/down ratings to posts and videos
  • Offers interactive email surveys
  • Offers 24/7 support

Pricing:

  • Free plan
  • Paid plans starting at $15/month

Reviews:

  • G2 – 4.2
  • Capterra – n/a

Website:

https://crowdsignal.com/

5. Talkwalker for social listening

It’s useful to follow what people say about your brand, even when what they post on social media doesn’t require a quick response from customer service. You can find out about recurring trends and issues about your product and develop a strategy for improvement with these insights in mind.
Talkwalker’s Social Intelligence product analyzes consumer insights from social media platforms, blogs, forums and news sites. Besides traditional text-based monitoring, it also tracks brand logos and mentions in images and videos.

There are various ways you can use social listening in practice including hashtag tracking. You can analyze various hashtags including your own branded hashtags, trending hashtags as well as event, content and campaign hashtags. Talkwalker’s social media search tool allows you to monitor hashtags for free, but their paid social media analytics platform also includes detailed hashtag analytics.

Top benefits for customer service:

  • Monitors texts, images and videos
  • Can integrate into your social media management platforms
  • Sends automated alerts for unusual activity
  • Saves up to 5 years of data to monitor past trends

Pricing:

  • on demand

Reviews:

Website:

https://www.talkwalker.com/social-intelligence-product

6. Kontentino for planning and scheduling posts

Handling customer service on social media may also include building and maintaining a strong presence on the most popular platforms. You can use Kontentino to plan, approve and publish social media content across multiple accounts. The tool provides a clear overview of scheduled posts through a built-in calendar as well as a visual planner to see how your planned posts will look once they’re published.

Kontentino is also great for collaboration: team members can request feedback on posts before publishing them, which is especially helpful in customer service. With this feature, posts mentioning confidential information can be reviewed by managers or clients before sharing them with the public.

Top benefits for customer service:

  • Supports a wide range of social media platforms (including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter and Pinterest)
  • Provides analytics features to track social media performance
  • Allows teams to collaborate on content creation
  • Saves time by managing multiple social media accounts with one tool

Pricing:

  • starting at €44/month

Reviews:

Website:

https://www.kontentino.com/

7. Databox for keeping track of the analytics of your platforms

Instead of checking individual social media platform’s analytics one by one, Databox helps you access all your social media accounts’ performance in one place. This tool integrates with various social media platforms, such as Facebook Pages, Instagram Business, Twitter, LinkedIn Company Pages, Snapchat Ads and TikTok Ads.

You can build dashboards to visualize data however it fits your purposes and add custom metrics as well. You can also set your KPIs; Databox keeps track of them and alerts you when important changes happen regarding these metrics. To save time, the software also offers automated reports, so you can focus on connecting with your customers.

Top benefits for customer service:

  • Integrates with 100+ platforms
  • Has thousands of pre-built metrics
  • Tracks & notifies about custom metrics
  • Built-in goal tracker

Pricing:

  • Free-forever plan including 3 data source connections and 3 dashboards
  • Paid plans starting at $72/month

Reviews:

Website:

https://databox.com/

8. Grammarly for error-free messages to customers

To make sure you catch errors while writing messages, you can use Grammarly’s browser extension – it checks your accuracy across all online platforms including your social media accounts. Apart from spelling, grammar and punctuation errors, this extension also catches commonly confused words and offers the right phrase depending on the context.

The free plan contains a tone detector as well, so you know how you’ll sound to the reader and you can adjust your wording before sending the message if necessary. This is especially useful for customer service agents who want to remain polite while dealing with challenging complaints or rude customers.

The premium version also offers full-sentence rewrite suggestions and word choice enhancements to help you communicate more clearly and concisely.

Top benefits for customer service:

  • Catches writing errors all across the internet
  • Helps you find the right style with a tone detector
  • Gives real-time suggestions to provide clarity to customers
  • Speeds up the messaging process – no copy-pasting required

Pricing:

  • Free plan
  • Premium plan: starting at €12/month

Reviews:

Website:

https://www.grammarly.com

9. DeepL for translating international inquiries (and replying to them, too)

DeepL is a tool that gives you accurate translations in 31 languages. The free version allows you to translate 5000 characters per translation and three whole documents (in PDF, Word or PowerPoint format) per month.

If your business requires higher volumes of translations or strong data security, you might want to upgrade to one of the paid plans (starter, advanced or ultimate). These versions provide maximum data security through end-to-end encryption and immediate text deletion. You can also translate without a character limit, and have 5, 20 or 100 file translations per month depending on the plan.

Similarly to Grammarly, DeepL also has a browser extension so you can translate messages, entire websites and even your own messages as you type them.

Top benefits for customer service:

  • Translates texts in 31 languages
  • Translates up to 5000 characters/text
  • Offers multiple suggestions in languages with formal and informal pronouns
  • Speeds up international communication via the browser extension

Pricing:

  • Free version
  • Paid plans: starting at €7.49/month

Reviews:

Website:

https://www.deepl.com/translator

10. Rebrandly for link management

Shortening and branding links you post or share in direct messages sent to customers can help your linked resources look more credible and safer to click.

With Rebrandly, you can do various link management tasks besides rebranding them. Just to mention a few: you can create QR codes out of your branded links or access analytics with the most popular click metrics visualized.

While the free version of this tool allows you to track up to 2500 clicks and create 250 branded links, the paid plans can analyze and rebrand a lot more links. They also have features like setting expiration dates (Professional plan) or creating multiple links at the same time (available in all paid plans).

Top benefits for customer service:

  • Enhances brand visibility through links
  • Tracks your social media click stats
  • Helps you integrate branded links into already existing workflows
  • Connects you with team members to manage links together

Pricing:

  • Free version
  • Paid plans starting at $12/month

Reviews:

Website:

https://www.rebrandly.com/

Delight your customers everywhere

We hope these tools will inspire you to handle customer service on social media as well.

Here’s how we helped SYKES engage with their audience on Facebook:

If you’re interested in connecting with your customers on multiple platforms, check out more about channels supported by VCC Live:

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