To provide excellent customer support, the most important thing is listening.
By simply listening to your customers, you can learn so much about customers’ wants and needs.
You know what they say – a happy customer is a loyal customer.
💡 Read Media Monitoring: The Ultimate Guide
With the ever-growing competition and with the presence of social media platforms, no brand can allow themselves to ignore their customers or to be rude and unhelpful.
Nowadays, bad reviews spread like fire.
If bad reviews keep piling up, you’ll not only lose existing customers but potential customers as well.
And who can afford to lose customers?
There are many ways to improve your customer support. In this article, we’ll talk about the power of having the right data and using it productively.
How do I get the right data?
Use media monitoring.
Media monitoring will not only provide you with relevant data, but it’ll also save you time and money. You won’t have to endlessly google what’s being said about your brand nor will you have to guess what would your customer want.
With media monitoring, you can collect online mentions of your brand that will give you insight into your customers’ preferences.
By creating reports, you can track your brand’s performance and see whether you’re making progress with your customer’s satisfaction or not.
Let’s examine further how media monitoring can help you improve your customer support.
Building relationships with your customers
People are often using social media to express their frustrations about something.
So, when they have problems with your product/service they will most likely share that with their Facebook friends, Twitter followers, etc.
Also, it could be that they tried to call your customer service first and didn’t get a reply so they didn’t have another choice than go online.
Remember, people expect your answer and they expect it ASAP.
Here’s how media monitoring can help you in these situations.
In the tool, you should set up your topics using relevant keywords – the name of your company, your industry, CEO of the company and all the key people, etc.
You should also add your competitors so you can track what they’re doing and learn from their successes and failures.
When the customer mentions your product/service online, you will be able to see it in the tool. Also, you can track the automatic sentiment of mentions and/or adjust it yourself so you can get a clear image of your brand’s reputation among customers.
This will give you a clear overview of areas that need improvement. You’ll be able to see which complaints come up a lot and respond to them.
Speaking of complaints…
Dealing with complaints
Let’s say that you run a telecommunications company.
The customers using your services is unsatisfied with the signal on their phone. They go on Twitter and complain. The complaints then grow and spread, and that becomes a problem.
Instead of finding out about the complaints after they begin trending on Twitter, you can detect them seconds after they were published and react immediately.
Every time the number of mentions starts rapidly growing, you’ll get the real-time alert so you can start thinking about the way you should respond. You can receive the alerts on email, mobile app, and Slack.
That way you can stop bad news from spreading and the customers will appreciate you for reaching out and showing that you care. Some customers may tweet again, but this time the tweets will be full of praises.
Look at the example above. Websites sometimes crash, it happens. But if the website is not working, and you’re not responding to customers’ questions, they’ll give up from purchasing your products and go somewhere else.
With a quick response, you can sell your products after all and have a happy, returning customer.
P. S. keep in mind that sometimes customers won’t tag you in their posts, so without media monitoring, you won’t even know that you’re about to have a problem on your hands.
Being helpful
Let’s say the customer needs a recommendation for a nice, but cheap hotel in Paris.
He posts the inquiry on social media in hope that his friends and followers will recommend something.
Let’s say that you work for a nice, but cheap hotel in Paris.
With media monitoring, you can discover that tweet immediately after it was posted and proactively contact the potential customer and recommend your hotel.
Now, it doesn’t mean that the customer will choose your hotel this time, but your proactive approach and willingness to help will surely make a great impression.
He might recommend you to his friends or stay at your hotel some other time. Either way, you expanded your reach and potentially gained new customers.
This type of approach gives you competitive advantage.
Showing appreciation
Social media can sometimes seem to be full of complaints and negativity.
But, in the sea of negativity, we can find some positive examples of customers being happy with brands and expressing the love on social media.
You should not ignore these types of posts.
If you’re responding to bad ones, you should also respond to the good ones. Thank the customers for their kind words and show them you value their opinion. Sometimes brands will go even further and give people discounts or a free service.
To summarize
You should always work towards improving your customer support. Sometimes, great customer support can be a deciding factor in choosing between two products or services.
By incorporating media monitoring into your business, you’ll make it easier for your employees to manage customers’ wants, needs, and complaints. Even though media monitoring tools are primarily aimed at PR professionals and marketers, various departments in the company can benefit from it as well. Customer support is one of them!