Today, many people who have issues with a company, such as yours, tend to head online to voice their complaints. They often head to one of the social media platforms, such as Facebook, to do so. This has the potential to be quite bad for your business unless you are able to find a quick resolution. Companies today are really just starting to understand how important social media is in this regards. While it can be a platform for customers to voice their anger or frustration, it also happens to be a platform where your company can turn those frustrations around with some simple customer management.
Tips for Making Facebook Work for Customer Service
First, when you decide that you will be performing customer service through FB, you have to have a unified approach to how you will respond and what you can do for different customers. For example, if two customers have identical problems, they should have the same resolution even when handled by different parties from your customer service team. If Customer 1 receives a full refund, Customer 2 should not get only a partial refund. If that happens, people will try to find a reason behind the company, and they may try to skewer your company for it.
Second, you need to be transparent when it comes to resolutions. When customers go to your page and post a question or issue, respond there openly so everyone can see that you are resolving the issue as well as how you are resolving it.
Sometimes, customers might have an issue that they post to their own FB page rather than to your page. You can use various tools to monitor your company’s mentions on FB, such as Social Mention. When you see that someone has an issue, you can comment on their page and ask how you can help them. Going out of your way to do this shows that your company does actually care about their issue, and this can go a long way into giving that customer, and anyone who sees his or her Facebook page, a better impression of your brand.
Keep Track of Your Resolutions
Something that you might find when you start tracking customer issues and your resolutions is that you have a fundamental issue with one area of your business. Perhaps the instructions that come with your product aren’t clear, and that is causing problems for customers, for example. Maybe there is an issue with the packaging. It could be anything, but keeping track of the issues and the resolutions from FB will help you in a couple of different ways.
First, you can make changes that will eventually eliminate this issue. Second, it can make subsequent resolutions on the same problem faster and easier to achieve. Have a catalog of these problems and resolutions that your customer service reps can access. You may even want to build an FAQ tab for your site, as well as for your FB page, that can answer many of the questions and problems that your customers may be having. This can make things easier on them, as well as your customer service staff.
Though Facebook has been around for years now, customer service through this and other social media sites really is in the early stages. Keep watching how other brands are using the site to help their customers and follow those who are successful. The tips here should get you started in the right direction, and they should be able to help alleviate some of the customer complaints before they become destructive to your brand.
Resource: http://mashable.com/2012/04/19/facebook-customer-service-tips/