How to Boost and Optimize Customer Service On Social Media

Social networks are an excellent tool for connecting with customers. In a world dominated by Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or TikTok, some of the biggest challenges businesses face include:

Provide personalized services to clients and potential clients.

Scale customer service without diminishing personalization.

Improve the quality of service and provide more accurate information to customers.

Focusing on any of these elements can often lead to compromising other factors. For example, providing customers with quality support and personalized services can often mean not being able to do so with large numbers of them.

Your best bet to improve your customer service while maintaining customization and scalability is to use AI and automation.

Many brands already use artificial intelligence tools like chatbots on their websites and social media. Next, we’ll look at how chatbots can make customer service more effective, especially on social media.

Why use social networks as a customer service tool

Social networks began as platforms for relationship-based interactions. However, it soon became apparent that they are a great platform for finding clients. And not only that, people use the media to ask questions and get customer support.

There are some important reasons for this:

1. Interactions on social networks, especially on Facebook pages and public groups, are open to all users. This makes companies more responsible.
2. Social networks are designed to be easy to use and allow people to communicate quickly and effectively with businesses.
3. Therefore, companies are interested in leveraging social networks to provide customer service. And they have to do it smoothly and with consistently high quality. 80% say they will stop doing business with a company after a bad customer service experience. Chatbots can step in and make customer support effective while appearing to deliver personalized, almost “human” services.

How AI is transforming customer service

Quite often, people approach customer support to ask simple and easy questions to pull from a database. For example, questions about store hours, whether a store delivers to a specific location, or whether your business is open on a certain holiday are relatively easy to answer.

When your customer support staff is busy with these tasks, they could use their time more effectively. Customers with more complex problems and urgent needs may end up at the back of the queue.

You can use chatbots to solve problems where customers are more likely to use a script. These scripts are queries that revolve around specific domains. 

Things like asking about your product availability, features, shipping time, etc., are very domain specific. With research and testing, you can predict certain scripts and create the appropriate responses.

A chatbot can answer these questions when customers make inquiries on social media.

Practical ways to automate customer service

There are several useful tools available that you can use to automate customer support. Here are some options to explore:

Use a conversational AI tool: If you want a tool that works across multiple platforms, you should consider adopting a robust and integrative informal AI tool. This tool is right when your product needs timely information and regular customer support.

Take advantage of messaging chatbot platforms: Messaging is a key part of social media platforms today. Facebook and Instagram allow people to have private conversations with businesses and with each other. Using social media and messaging-based chatbot tools will allow you to create auto-responders on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc. This option is ideal for small businesses working in limited local markets.

Add live chat: You can combine automated chat scripts with live chat support. That is, you can configure a chat tool on your website or social networks so that people are received with scripts and templates. If users find these options not helpful, they can quickly switch to live customer support. Live chat tools allow your customer support staff to offer help via messages. Your team members can help customers even from their mobile phones by choosing the right tool.

Use built-in features: Facebook has solutions to help you create templates for frequently asked questions. Their messaging platform can even be applied to your website and integrates with live agent options.