How To Boost Your Customer Service Through Social Listening

Are you aware of all the messages, comments, and conversations about your brand on social channels? You should be.

Unattended requests and disregarded comments left on your pages can escalate to bigger issues before you can tell what went wrong.

Even if you respond to every message or comment and mention regarding your brand, it’s essential to realize that there is much more to customer service than merely replying to your customers online.

Only a small part of support requests mention the relevant brands on social media – you can find the rest by using social listening. Leveraging social listening tools to help you tune into these conversations can significantly enhance your customer service across social channels.

Read on to find out what that means!

What Is Social Listening?

Social listening is the method of tracking and monitoring the brand mentions, comments, conversations, or any online activity related to your business offerings or even industry-related topics. It helps you get an idea of how customers perceive your brand, competitors’ brand, and the market.

Furthermore, the process of social listening also allows you to find platforms where customers talk about your brand and what kind of content piques their interests.

To accomplish this, companies monitor and track their social media channels for their products, mentions, keywords, and related activities to know the customers and their perceptions.

Once you gather that information, you can leverage it to forge actionable insights about the customers and the way they respond to your brand’s name. These actions can include resolving customer concerns, providing solutions to dissatisfied customers, or responding to happy customers.

Why Does Social Listening Matter?

When it comes to a dissatisfied customer, it is crucial to determine what made them turn before they spread the discontentment. It could be because they are unsatisfied with the product or price, no longer interested in your offerings or because of poor customer service.

When customers stop purchasing or engaging with a brand that provides terrible customer services, it is imperative to get valuable insights through social listening tools to deliver an exceptional customer service experience.

In case brands don’t respond on time, they decide to switch and shop elsewhere.

Unfortunately, poor interaction with a brand on social media is not just confined to the customer, but they share their bad experiences too, and this can significantly affect your bottom line.

29% of the consumers ranked their first contact resolution as the most valuable factor in customer support and service interaction, so there’s no faster route to lose customers than to overlook them and their concerns.

It is crucial to put customer service at the heart of your business and tie it to social monitoring and listening.

Reasons To Use Social Listening For Customer Service

Using social media as a customer support channel helps to keep direct contact with buyers. You can respond to customer queries on different platforms with direct messages, tweets, or comments.

A Walker study revealed that by the end of 2020, customer experience would go beyond product and price as the key differentiator of a brand. This indicates the importance of social listening tools that can gauge and analyze your customer’s perceptions.

For customers, it’s all about accessibility and convenience. They assume and expect that they will not have to wait for long hours before they reply as with traditional communication platforms. In fact, 42% of the customers expect to get a response to their social media queries in 30 minutes.

How do you leverage social listening for customer experience, or how can it help improve your customer service? Of course, social listening is more than just checking for comments and suggestions from customers on social channels.

Let’s delve deeper into how you can get the most out of social listening to improve your customer service and, ultimately, their experience.

How Can Social Listening Tools Improve Customer Service?

With the help of social listening, you can boost your revenue, get higher customer satisfaction rates, and deliver a great customer experience, which can help you successfully grow your business.

For instance, at McDonald’s, customers asked for more sauce at the restaurants. Fortunately, McDonald’s was listening and responded in the best way.

Source: McDonald’s

Gain Valuable Customer Insights

Social listening can help you determine the topics and content that your customers love and often engage with. And naturally, the better you understand your customer’s interests, the more streamlined your approach can be to reach them.

This means you can generate and share more relevant content, such as targeted tips and articles, and generally engage with them in their preferred tone.

When deploying social listening, it is crucial to find and decide on the channels you aim to monitor. As new digital media emerge, choose the ones your customers are most active and present on. That way, you can get accurate information about your customers and their behavior patterns.

Once you decide on the channels, you can track the customers, both potential and current, and see what perception they hold about your brand.

Foster Better Relationships With Customers

When you engage and resonate with your customers on social media, you are able to establish strong relationships with them. It builds customer loyalty and helps you learn about them on a personal level.

In essence, the customer insights you gain with social listening tools help you cultivate and maintain long term customer connections. And this goes a long way as your customers instill their trust in your brand.

Furthermore, when you interact with them on social platforms through listening tools, you become a part of the conversation, responding to customers in real-time.

Source: Twitter

Take a look at eBay’s channel for customer support on Twitter where their customers, prospective and current, can seek advice and put forward their concerns. eBay makes sure they deliver excellent customer service, and their Twitter is just an extension of this goal.

Identify Customer Pain Points

As social listening tools precisely lets you know about how your customers interact with your brand and its offerings on social channels, you can directly engage with them over the platforms to know their views about a particular product or service.

When your customers connect and engage with your brand on social media, they are already telling you about their preferences and choices.

With Mentionlytics, you can monitor your brand product mentions and make sure that you don’t miss any conversation or valuable insight. It lets you measure your online activities in the most impactful way.

Feedback about your offerings can help you better cater to your potential and existing customers’ needs while ensuring higher satisfaction levels.

Handle Negative Complaints and Reviews

Don’t just respond to customers but resolve their issues, too. A well worded, timely response to a negative review is a good start. However, your work just doesn’t end there. Critically analyze what and why the customer had the issue with your product or service and identify the deeper problem imminent.

Social listening tools let you find detailed information about a comment, message, or conversation and help you be proactive on social media platforms by gauging and responding to your customers.

For instance, if a customer complained about their bad experience with an impolite sales representative, don’t just pay them lip service. Instead, take concrete measures to fix the situation and let your customers know that their concerns are valid and valued.

Furthermore, the chances are that if something is wrong with your product, social media is where you’ll find out about it. Ensure that you pay attention to even the smallest problems and customer concerns. Also, acknowledge their contribution and let them know how they helped you.

Naturally, customer views and opinions shared on social platforms are often considered more authentic and reliable than other sources because they tend to be more genuine and honest — even if they aren’t positive.

Rebuild Your Customers’ Trust In Your Brand

Through social listening tools, you can identify the meaningful conversations across your social channels that don’t mention your brand in a good light and rebuild their trust in the brand by helping them out with their unique needs.

That way, you assure them that their problems don’t go unheard, and you are there to help them out in the best way possible. And a social listening tool like Mentionlytics provides AI-powered social media monitoring that lets you access competitors’ insights, brand mentions, products, and industry.

Leverage User-Generated Content To Your Advantage

Consumers often post videos, photos, and leave positive reviews about a brand’s offering if they have a good experience. Social listening enables you to find this content to use it as a part of your marketing and PR collateral.

You can find, amplify and repurpose the user-generated content while remaining impactful among the competition. Use these videos and posts to create and can maintain a lead while also staying in front of your customer’s eyes at all times.

Mentionlytics helps you monitor the brand-related content on social media while also giving you the power to analyze your website content for maximum effectiveness.

Ready To Listen To Your Customers On Social Platforms?

It is vital to hear what your patrons say or think about your brand, service, or product.

Social listening tools can help you understand your brand’s image and grow your business with a customer-oriented approach. They also let you gain more insights into what your customers like, want, and dislike about the brand.

Mentionlytics is an AI-powered feature tool that lets you do all that and a lot more. It enables you to understand your position among your competition and better align with your customers.

With the options to monitor, analyze, measure, and respond to the messages, conversations, or comments, Mentionlytcis can also help generate leads, protect you from a reputation crisis, and effectively implement social media strategies.

You can track your social media forums and websites alike with precision. Brand mentions, public opinion, AI-powered smart data collection, product feedback, reviews, and more – Mentionlytics lets you do it all.

Get exclusive in-depth insights with Mentionlytics. Book your free trial with us!

Originally posted on Mentionlytics : https://www.mentionlytics.com/blog/how-to-boost-your-customer-service-through-social-listening