Three ways to boost customer satisfaction via social media

It’s important to clarify that not every start-up needs to use social media for customer service.

The golden rule when you’re looking to deliver great customer service is to communicate with customers through the medium that they want to use, not the medium that your business would prefer them to use.

However, we do operate in an ever more ‘social’ society and more and more people are taking to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, forums and other social media outlets to ask for assistance, express their views and share information about products and services.

If your customers fall into one or more of these categories then you’ll want to have a strategy in place to manage their interactions and turn them to your advantage.

Here are some pointers on how to do this in such a way that your customers will be delighted that they dropped you a line.

1. Tweet your customers right

Mobile devices have fuelled the social media customer service revolution and people nowadays have an appetite for accessing information immediately and on the move.

Using social media to improve customer satisfaction is less about the channel you use and more about how you use it to communicate. With the latter in mind, my mantra has always been:

• respond to customers quickly – you don’t need to have an immediate solution but they need to know you’re working on it;

• communicate using a human, not a corporate voice. You can still have a professional business voice but by being personable your customers know that although they are communicating virtually, there is a real person out there who cares;

• monitor for common themes and trends. Customer service is your early warning signal so take heed, get specialist help from within the business for complex queries and ensure your customer service team knows to escalate up when necessary; and

• ask customers how you performed. What was their experience and how could it have been improved?

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