How to Elevate the Customer Experience with Social Media

Social media is distinctive as it can impact the customer experience you're providing at multiple touchpoints. Customer experience, also known as CX, is the overall perception your customers have of your business as they engage with your products, navigate your website, engage on your marketing channels, connect with customer service, and more.

Providing an exceptional customer experience matters as it increases the chances you'll turn your customers into avid supporters, encourage repeat customers, and spur word-of-mouth. Because social media can be used for paid advertising, marketing, public relations, customer service, market research, and a variety of other ways, the medium can have an outsized role in affecting a customer's perception of a brand.

In this edition of Social Media Marketing Trends, we'll focus on social media's role in delivering a memorable customer experience, specifically the evolving role of social customer service for businesses, which CX metric matters most to marketers today, and how to elevate your social media messaging with a conversational tone.

Customer care on social media

Forrester estimates that there’s as much as a 40% increase in digital customer service interaction due to the pandemic. That's primarily because of an influx of new customers online. What this means is that the value of social customer care has increased significantly, given it's becoming a more important touchpoint in the customer experience. To elevate your social customer care offerings, it's essential that your organization:

• Prioritizes delivering quality care: High-quality social customer care is defined by responding promptly and consistently resolving your customer's issues with empathy. Customers forgive longer wait times if the interaction results in a positive outcome.
• Automates responsibly wherever possible: To deal with the scale of customer service requests, free up your agents' time by automating repetitive tasks, for instance, setting up chatbots or autoresponder messages. One in five business leaders says they've had a high ROI using automation in their customer service, according to a survey from Zendesk .
• Hires more customer service reps: To deliver quality care at scale, you’ve got to hire more customer service agents. Each agent can only realistically address a certain number of cases per day. If your existing agents are overwhelmed, there's a lower than acceptable customer satisfaction score, or your average resolution time is longer than 24 hours, it's likely time to start hiring.?

Reassessing social media metrics

According to the 7th edition of the State of Marketing Report by Salesforce , 78% of marketing organizations shifted the metrics they prioritize because of the pandemic. Customer satisfaction, i.e., how happy your customers are with your services, products, and messaging, is now marketers' most helpful measure of success.

When it comes to your social media marketing efforts, prioritize customer satisfaction as a KPI to assess the strength of your relationship with customers, indicating their willingness to engage, recommend, or spend money with your brand over others.

Think of customer satisfaction as either meeting, surpassing, or failing to address your customer's expectations. From a measurement standpoint, you can use your social analytics to get a quantitative view and the sentiment of the feedback received on social media in the form of comments and mentions to measure customer satisfaction qualitatively.?

Humanizing your messaging

Changing the tone of your messaging on social media can impact how customers view your business. Whether you're being irreverent, humourous, inspirational, empathetic, or helpful, it affects the perception of your company. Brands that aim to entertain, educate, and share their values on social media are far more likely to connect with their customers than those that only promote themselves and communicate using predictable corporate jargon.

There are many different ways to humanize your message, but it always boils down to being:

1. Relatable: Mirror the way your customers talk, so it feels more like a dialogue.
2. Consistent: Regularly communicate in your chosen voice to set expectations.
3. Connect over shared interests: Communicate on a set group of topics that help define how your brand fits in a customer's life.

This is a highlight reel of my LinkedIn Learning course on?Social Media Marketing Trends , which has been taken by over 100,000+ students.