Using Facebook For Customer Service?

Facebook has certainly come a long way since the days of just being a place for college students to hang out online. It’s grown exponentially to the point that it’s normal to see big brands and companies’ updates along with personal friends’ posts comingling in your timeline.

Along with these changes in online social interactions, people’s actions and expectations have also transformed when it comes to communicating with companies online. Customers expect to be able to contact a company via sites like Twitter or Facebook and receive a prompt reply.

Now that companies understand the virality of information shared via a site like Facebook, they’re paying more attention to the activity and interactions on their Facebook pages. It only takes one negative comment or experience with a company for that information to spread at lightning speed, so if you don’t take the time to monitor customer conversations, comments, or questions, you could be damaging your company’s reputation without even realizing it.

A very popular incident that occurred a few years ago involved United Airlines and a broken guitar, which may be partly to blame for that dip in stock price. There are many more stories like this because people now know the power of social media.

So, how do you go about providing a better experience for customers on social sites like Facebook?

Stacey Politi offers 8 ways to offer customer service on Facebook. Here’s another article by Jackie Cohen that offers 5 ways to beef up customer service on Facebook.

Although there are other modes of communication available for customers to contact you, Facebook is probably one of the most important ones to pay attention to because that is where the majority of people spend their time. In fact, Facebook is expecting to hit 1 billion users sometime this year.

Social media can be one of your best tools to deepen the relationship with your clients or customers. Many of us use Facebook to connect with friends to find out the latest news on each others’ lives, so why not use it in a similar fashion with your business? Offering your customers a more personal, authentic perspective into your organization while respecting and responding to their feedback fosters loyalty and trust.

If you currently don’t have a strategy or plan to use Facebook for business, but would like to start, feel free to contact us for help!

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