Responding on Social Media
Category : Social Media
What customers or prospective customers are looking for on social media in terms of your response is just as important as actually responding in and of itself.
Instead of a long blog post, we’ll boil it down to two types of responses:
Best Practice:
Customer: I’m looking for warranty information for my car’s air conditioner motor.
Business: Can you tell me your phone number, date, and location of purchase?
Customer: October 15, 2019, 555-555-555, Long Island, NY.
Business: Let me look that up
Customer: Ok
Business: Customer: Your warranty period started on 12/1/2018 and ends 12/1/2019. Just bring the motor in to any of our locations along with this information and we’ll be happy to warranty out your motor.
Worst Practice:
Customer: I’m looking for warranty information for my car’s air conditioner motor.
Business: Please go to our website under ‘help, warranty’ and fill out our form
or:
Business: Please call us at 555-555-5555 so we can help you further.
With a few exceptions such as legal counsel or HIPAA, a business should respond fully over social. Except where legally bound to get further verification or privacy concerns such as transmittal of social security numbers, this should be the best practice. Why? Often customers have the other channels of communication i.e. phone or a website but are looking for a response through this channel.
In short it’s always good to respond through social as fully as you can. Asking a customer to change channels is risking a potential dissatisfied customer. Customer service is a vital part of your social media strategy.