Anna Drennan

To measure the current state of retailers’ readiness to truly engage with their customers via their Facebook pages, Conversocial carried out a research project examining content and responsiveness for Econsultancy’s top 10 UK retailers in Facebook. The results show a startling spread of readiness, with the best performing company, Next, responding to questions in less than an hour. Amazon on the other hand, the worst performer, didn’t respond at all and seemed to have little interest in engaging its community.

Conversocial have used their research to provide tips for other companies to deliver better customer service in Facebook.

Always reply

Do not be selective about which of your customers get a response and those who do not – each ignored complaint or question reflects negatively on your brand and can easily spread to a large audience. A policy of zero customer support is deadly on Facebook; if you can’t manage two-way conversation, you’re in the wrong place.

Enable your wall

There is no benefit in trying to hide from complaints. Your company will waste time seeking out reputation risks and upset your customers in the process. It is much better to channel customer service issues on to your wall, rather than spread them to all of your fans via updates visible in the newsfeed.

Monitor your fan page throughout the day

Give social media the same level of attention as email and phone calls. Applying tighter SLAs for social media could give you the competitive edge in the developing space of social customer service.

Add personality to your responses

Let your customers know who they are speaking to. This is even more important in Facebook and Twitter than via email support, as your fans and followers expect a different experience of your brand. This is an ideal opportunity to show your customers what kind of company you are – ideally one with real people who care.

Use a page management tool with customer service workflow

Ensure you don’t miss comments and posts, and filter large volumes of interactions easily. Unlike traditional service channels such as email and phone, not every message on Facebook requires follow up action; and comments on photos or older posts are not easily visible without searching for them. Efficiency features such as auto-flagging and team workflow make it easy to see what needs to be dealt with and what your colleagues have already taken care of.

You can read the white paper in full, and find out how UK retailers are excelling, and failing, in social customer service at http://www.conversocial.com/blog/entry/white-paper-who-s-ignoring-their-customers

About the author

Anna Drennan is Marketing Manager at Conversocial. Conversocial is Integrated Social CRM and Marketing Software for Facebook and Twitter that provides advanced publishing, insights and comment management tools. Efficient cross-departmental workflow saves time and makes scalable conversation management possible. Using Conversocial’s collaborative platform, companies can interpret what their customers need, make better marketing decisions and deliver excellent customer service.

www.conversocial.com