We’ve touched upon this previously (and we don’t need to remind anyone of the importance of good customer service) but perhaps you haven’t considered how social media can be a great way to handle customer feedback. Estate Agent Today recently published a piece about how agents must not ignore bad online reviews, and it could not be more true. People are talking about your business online whether you have a presence or not.

Having social media offers them a platform to do this on your terms, and invites them to engage in a conversation with you rather than talking behind your back.

Familiarity

People are far more likely to get in contact with you via direct messages via social platforms than by a stuffy ‘Contact Us’ form on your website, as it’s much more familiar to them. People seek resolution for issues on social media networks like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. If they’re, for example, on Facebook, chances are they use it regularly and are therefore more likely to reach out there than on your website which they rarely visit and Facebook Messenger is an excellent tool for customer care and a popular trend in recent years.

When people decide to reach out to your business on social media, it means that they want to ensure that their request will be received by a customer service team who will assist them directly. With almost everyone carrying a smartphone nowadays, if you’re on social media you’re right at your customers’ fingertips.

Chatbots’ enhancement to the customer care process

Chatbots have a significant role to play in cultivating the feeling of familiarity for social media users. A relationship can almost immediately be established because your point of contact is personal and instantly. It is important that your agency allows potential clients to contact you easily and via their method of choice. Most prefer communication channels such as WhatsApp or Telegram, which is widely used, as they are free.

The last thing a customer wants is to sit there with a bunch of questions that they’d like to ask, but there’s no soundboard on the receiving end. To this end, the seamless integration of chatbots create a far more palatable customer experience because it simultaneously addresses the needs and questions of many customers, whilst also creating a comforting feeling that you’re receiving answers, instantaneously. 

TVPN has developed ChatPal, which is an excellent tool that will greatly improve your lead generation because of its interactive qualities. Using ChatPal, for example, can be linked to WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger where you will then be able to broadcast a pre-approved message to up to 1,000 recipients at once with a 96% open rate. Talk about efficiency!  

Consequently, ChatPal can be the ultimate solution for online customer care because this nifty tool that allows automation for communicating with clientele that need answers immediately. ChatPal enables a flow of conversation that can happen promptly, and the bot has been programmed to respond in such a way that customers will be satisfied with minimal to no input from you. ChatPal’s chatbot is the perfect tool to utilise if you’re trying to carve out as much time as possible for yourself during the day to get other work. Software such as this allows you to free up time whilst still satisfying clientele; giving them the attention and answers they need.

Visibility

It is both a blessing and a curse that Facebook comments, tweets, and Google reviews are all public and, often, the first thing people look at when researching your business. But it’s only a curse if you don’t know how to handle them. On the positive side, having social media gives customers a platform to praise you! If they particularly like your service, they’re going to want to tell people. Rather than posting it to their personal pages and reaching their audience, surely, it’s better that they post on your page and reach yours?

It would also be advised to monitor those social channels to catch any mentions of your company. There are various software programs currently available to capture this data, and this way of monitoring and dealing with online conversations increase the engagement and can also help to spot unhappy customers.

Complaints procedure

If you do receive negative feedback, your response should be humble and gracefully executed. Dealing with them requires a specific strategy and failing to do so can lead to a reputation crisis. Everyone can see that a user was dissatisfied, so with the use of social media and a thoughtful social customer care strategy, you will be able to show those who follow you that you take complaints seriously, that you’re conscientiously trying to improve yourself and your business along with striving to make a user happy and satisfied.

Online complaints differ to traditional complaints, as everyone looking for you on the internet can see them. Who among us doesn’t check for negative reviews before buying a product nowadays?  If you can show people that you handle bad reviews with honesty, humility, and professionalism, you might just undo the negative response of the criticism. This is surely better than letting bad reviews sit unanswered and unaccounted for.

If you want a seamless complaints procedure to ultimately, please customers who want to share their experience or questions on social media, it’s important to reduce server response time. The simplest way to execute this is to create an FAQ video and upload it to your business profile, as people can find resolution this way without reaching out to a customer service representative. If you don’t have the time or capacity to create an FAQ video, then chatbots can also be of help since they function based on the knowledge base to help customers get answers to frequently asked questions and more, but having both tools at your disposal would be optimal.

If no-one in your company has time, maybe you should consider outsourcing to an agency. Optimally, you’d check these posts and respond within the hour, especially if it’s a complaint that was raised.

Angels Media offer a range of packages from the smallest of budgets to the most ambitious. We’ve seen every kind of comment, review and complaint, and deal with them on a daily basis.

Interested in learning more? You can just email us at lee@angelsmedia.co.uk or call us on 020 663 4989 and we’ll work together to devise the right campaign for you.