Did you read my recent article which was Part 1 of my 2 Part Series about Why Your Brand Should Deliver Customer Service Through Social Media? If you did you might be thinking, “Wow, we really need to take initiative and jump in on these support channels.” But, you might also be asking yourself “where do we start?”
I get the chance to work with a lot of great brands, like VertiMax among others in the fitness industry. In my experience many businesses see marketing and customer service as being two unattached functions; and they operate separately with little to no interaction. Lead generation can be achieved but if there is no support or engagement you create a one-time buyer. This is not the best situation to have and results in a lot of lost opportunities.
What our team has learned at VertiMax and with our other Moon Mission clients is that by offering support and engagement pre-sale and post-sale, and by integrating digital interactions with marketing and service, companies can increase the odds that a first-time buyer will come back for more, or even better, become a brand ambassador.
Journalist, John Koetsier, provides an extreme example of KLM who has 150 staff members assigned to servicing their clients via social. This has resulted in their generating an additional $25M in annual revenue.
Now, I’m not suggesting that you need to go out there and double your employees or assign unrealistic goals to your current team members, but I am saying you should consider focusing on customer service through your social and digital channels and construct a plan to do it today.
Research cited by Jay Baer shows that Social Media is one of the Big Three customer service channels, joining phone and email to form the triad of support modalities. Now, isn’t it fair to say you wouldn’t dare do business without a phone or email? Well, Social Media needs to now be on that list as well. And not just social channels, we are talking today about SMS and bots as well.
Here are three systems that will provide you with a more sustainable approach to integrating customer service, sales, and marketing via social and digital channels that will result in outstanding customer service and increased revenues on a daily basis.
Sprout Social
Sprout Social helps you understand and reach your audience, engage your community, and measure performance while managing all your social channels. I love the platform and our team at Moon Mission has used it for years.
Organization. Managing and engaging a high volume of inbound messages and posts can be tough. Sprout Social allows you to organize and interact with these messages in a seamless way by monitoring all your social activity (FB, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn) in one single location.
Reactive Responses. Business that put an emphasis on social engagement and responsiveness reap the reward in terms of customer loyalty in the long term. According to Sprout Research 83% of consumers want brands to respond to them and 68% enjoy brands joining in on their conversations. Sprout Social allows you to collect and respond to all inbounding messages, tags, hashtags, mentions and reviews.
Scalability. It can be as easy as being present and addressing ALL inquiries. Answering a customer’s question on social prompts 48% of consumers to purchase. To insure you can complete the inbounding volume, Sprout supports effect teamwork with communication and collaboration tools. Assigning of tasks, and prevents redundancies.
Drift
Drift is a bot platform that allows you to create the perfect automated conversational flow for your website via bots. The result is quicker quicker personalized responses and the ability to resolve inquiries sooner for your customers. The platform has some cool analytics and functionality as well. Bots are big so check our Drift.
Responsiveness. In a Social Personality Research Study, 80% of customers say instant responses would increase their loyalty to a brand. When creating a conversational flow within your chatbot, FAQs can be answered right away and save you and your customer a support call. If more help is needed, then the bot can automatically route the conversation to a person for more personal touch.
Consistency. In the 2018 State of Chatbots Report, Chatbots vs Email, Chatbots are associated with being quicker and a more consistent way in receiving answers for simple and complex questions.
CRM System
Salesforce integrates every part of your company that interacts with your customers. From marketing, to sales, to customer support. CRMs are known to improve customer retention, by as much as 27%. Salesforce, being one of those CRMs, has always been a platform that I consider as one of my favorite digital tools.
Cases. Complaints or inbounding message can go directly to a qualified teammate to better serve a customer service response and resolution.
Customer Lifecycle. Salesforce keeps track of every customer interaction. Providing you with a full view of their behavior and history. Allowing you to fully track and engage with your customers at an intimate level.
Customer Services will set your business apart from other organizations. Bring value to this department and support their processes with the proper tools and resources. Digital platforms allow us to connect and service an abundance of people with a personalized touch which will better generate retention, new sales and overall brand loyalty.
Now, what actions will you take today to better your customer support with digital tools?
#customerservice #digitalresources #digitalservices #socialmedia #digitalmarketing #businessoperations #SproutSocial #socialmedia #Drift #bots #Salesforce #CRM #MoonMissionMedia ------------- Jessie Ehren has been in the fitness industry for 12 years and with the Moon Mission Media team for 2. With a focus on education and marketing, she is a content creator, social media manager, and education coordinator. Jessie loves working with clients that have the same passion for fitness and wellness where she can put her creative mind to work. Jessie has a knack to skillfully hone and help a company realize its mission, bringing integrity, honesty, creativity, and compassion to all of her work. Known for her attention to detail, Jessie is super easy to work with and loves getting to know her clients in order to meet and exceed their every marketing, business, and digital commerce needs.
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