How to use social data to optimize customer service

Social media is an endless resource of valuable data that can help your brand stand out. Keeping your social data coming is crucial to keep your brand “alive” and relevant. Outdated social data is the reason why 75% of all customer relationship management projects fail, claims Meta Group. Obviously, it’s something that shouldn’t be disregarded by any means.

A smart approach to treating social data is the No.1 marketing trend for many years to come. Recently, marketers have pointed out the crucial role and impact of social data on the efficiency of customer service.

Social data and customer support go hand-in-hand: the more you pay attention to the social data you receive from interactions with your customers, the better your customer support becomes, which greatly impacts customer satisfaction rates.

Brands that engage customer support to communicate with the customers can keep track of the following:

• response time;
• response rate;
• the volume of inquiries;
• resolution timing;
• resolution rate.

These are the aspects that provide valuable social data to your customer support service.

The statistical data supports the importance of incorporating results collected from social data for the effective functioning of customer service. In general, social media has greatly influenced the way customers prefer to communicate with the brands. Have a look at the stats by Social Media Examiner:

Reportedly, 67% of consumers prefer communicating with the brands on social media or use social media platforms solely to contact the brand’s customer support service. This trend has formed certain customer preferences when it comes to communicating with brands. The majority of customers (48%) want the brand to be responsive and resolve an issue within 12-24 hours.

The infographic by Ambassador shows different, but also very telling results:

In general, 71% of customers expect the brand to respond within 5 minutes on social media, 48% of them will leave the platform if they don’t get a response. 92% of the respondents claim they will leave the brand if it has a poor customer support service. And, in case the brand has a good social media customer support, 71% of customers will recommend it.

As you can see, having a proper customer support service on social media is very important for the success of your brand. Customer support can give you enough social data that will provide you with valuable information on what your customers expect from communicating with you.

Here are some benefits how customer service can benefit from social data:

• Specifying your target audience. Every brand understands that knowing their target audience well is the key to success. This means that you know exactly what kind of a message you want to deliver to your customers. Social data provides a complete analysis of customer experience and customer satisfaction rates as well as shows which customers and where are the most active users of your brand.
• Identifying pain points. Social data, collected from interacting with customers through customer service can be very beneficial when it comes to identifying and analyzing the issues customers have to come across. If several customers notify your customer support service about a similar issue, you obtain valuable data which will help you fix some issues related to your product or service.
• Analyzing full customer experience. Customer reviews provide valuable social data that helps brands analyze customer journey and make necessary amendments if their customers are not fully satisfied. Customer experience is the most important part of the customer-brand relationship, and social data can help you fix any issue that may arise.

Mining social data can help you optimize customer service and improve customer experience. Social data provides necessary information to personalize customer experience, show what’s working and what’s not, and increase response time and response rates.

How to use social data to optimize customer service?

Customer support services often use specific software to help automate customer support service. Let’s take a look at how you can use social data obtained from this software to optimize customer service, using LiveAgent as an example.

1. Analyze Tickets to Create FAQ and Customer Guides

Having ready answers for the most popular inquiries is an important part of optimizing customer service. Self-assistance is something that should be accessible to all your customers if you’re serious about your brand.

The stats show that 40% of customers prefer self-assistance to contacting a customer support representative. So having an FAQ page or a customer guide is a must. Moreover, according to the same stats, by adding self-assistance option your brand will be able to save up to $ 1 million annually.

Having ready answers can help customer service improve response time and rates as well as overall customer experience. What valuable social data can you obtain from LiveAgent?

LiveAgent uses a ticketing system when addressing a certain customer-related issue. A ticket is an interaction thread between a customer and a brand. Tickets represent a system that combines and stores all the emails, phone calls, live chats, interactions on social media – basically any form of communication between a customer and customer support representative.

A ticket has the following phases:

• New
• Open
• Answered
• Resolved
• Postponed.

Here’s how all these ticket phases look in LiveAgent:

The best aspect of the ticketing system is that it stores all forms of communication with the customers. It can help you provide a complete solution to any common problem your customers have with your product or service.

Each ticket phase provides valuable social data. Collecting data from resolved tickets and analyzing them can help you identify frequently asked questions and include them in guides for self-assistance. This will also help you speed up response rates if a customer redirects a common issue to customer support.

Postponed tickets also provide valuable social data, meaning that they give you necessary information about the complications and pain points indicated by your customers. This issue can also be resolved by using a special feature called “delegating responsibility”. By doing it you basically assign a certain department to cope with a particular issue.

Social data obtained from tickets must be thoroughly analyzed and regularly updated in order to maintain optimized customer service.

2. Automate Social Media Communications

Many customers prefer to contact a business on social media. In fact, according to Forrester, 80% of customers use social media platforms to communicate with brands. So don’t just redirect your customers to live chats on your website or to telephone hotlines. Communicate on social media. It’s faster and more effective.

Brands often use Facebook and Twitter to connect with customers as these two social media platforms offer the best options for communication (Twitter threads and Facebook Messenger). Twitter threads can be accessed and reviewed by anyone, so it’s a great way to share information concerning a certain issue.

When using social media for customer support purposes, it’s important to operate a software that will store all interactions with customers. LiveAgent has a feature that allows to connect it to Facebook to keep track of messages, posts, and comments. LiveAgent registers all communications and sends answers directly to Facebook.

Facebook interactions registered by LiveAgent are stored as tickets and it keep them archived. Other benefits include:

• automatic notifications about new comments, messages or posts on Facebook;
• all customer support agents have access to the brand’s Facebook page, so there’s no need to create multiple admins for the Facebook page;

Social data obtained from LiveAgent connected to Facebook is crucial for optimizing customer support service as it allows to store all interactions in one place. Moreover, it can save a lot of time. All inquiries come to one place instead of hundreds of distracting messages and notifications. Here’s what it looks like:

The same works for Twitter interactions. LiveAgent has the same feature for Twitter, allowing your brand to keep track of customer inquiries, respond to tweets that require instant action and keep all communications archived.

How can LiveAgent optimize your customer support on Twitter?

• It becomes easier to track brand mentions and trendy keywords
• You can connect multiple Twitter accounts and give permission to operate Twitter inquiries to several people, who are responsible for it
• Your responses will be sent directly as tweets
• You’ll get real-time data from your customers.

Twitter provides you with unique social data you can use to optimize your customer support service. However, collecting it could be a real challenge, since there are usually a lot of responses to a single tweet. By automating this process with LiveAgent you’ll be able to fully optimize the work of your customer support service, when it comes to interacting with customers on social media.

3. Benefit from Customer Portal

Setting up a customer portal includes creating a knowledge base, feature suggestions, collecting feedback and starting a forum. All these aspects contribute to self-assistance and provide social data that is necessary to keep you updated.

Self-service is reported to be among the top 3 priorities for companies to work on for the next year. This is one of the best ways to easily collect social data from responses and feedbacks coming from your customers. A forum can be an extremely informative source of data, which can give you the necessary information on what needs to be changed or updated.

Your customer service can benefit from customer portal in many different ways, including:

• Portals organize information, make it logical and consistent. It’s not only related to collecting customer feedback but also to organizing your guides, wiki articles, how-to videos, and other educational material. A portal is a convenient area where all helpful information can be easily accessed and you can refer your customers to browse it to find information.
• It will take a huge workload off your customer support. It’s definitely the best part you can benefit from. Normally, a customer support service deals with hundreds of inquiries a day. Having a forum where people can share their experiences can be helpful to anyone with a similar issue. And, your customer support will be able to deal with the inquiries coming from other channels more effectively.

Having a customer portal sounds great. But it could be even better if you could store all social data that comes from the customer portal in one place. By setting up a customer portal with the help of LiveAgent, you’ll be able to archive all interactions and even provide customer support when you’re offline. Ladesk also has its own customer portal, which looks like this:

Setting up a customer portal is a great way to keep everything organized. Moreover, you get an opportunity to build a community, where your customers can interact with each other. This is a great foundation for creating a strong and loyal client base, which is very important for any brand.

You can also encourage your customers to share their ideas and insights regarding your product. You can set up surveys to collect customer feedback on a regular basis to keep social data coming. All this information is important for helping your customer service work more effectively and keeping your customers satisfied.

Wrapping up

Customer support copes with a great chunk of work to promote your brand. They collect social data that is crucial in order to make your product more polished and ensure a positive customer experience overall.

But a great part of customer experience is also dealing with customer support service. And, if your customer service is overloaded with inquiries, it will take them more time to respond and resolve issues, which negatively impacts your brand.

Social data can help optimize your customer service. The data obtained from your customers can be used to help others cope with certain issues (by creating FAQs and forums), and it also takes a huge part of the workload off your customer service’s shoulders.

Optimized customer service is a priority for both a brand and a customer. Brands with award-winning customer support are more likely to be recommended. Keep that in minds, incorporate our tips into your customer service’s daily routine and you’ll be able to see the positive results very soon.