Good morning and welcome to the Monday morning marketing podcast, I'm Esther.
Melanie
And I'm Melanie.
And today we're talking about customer service on social media.
How important is customer service? Why should you have customer service? And what does it take to actually implement customer service? Where should we start, Esther?
Well, first and foremost, it is fundamental to have customer service. Now, what are we talk what are we talking about? When we say customer service on social media, we mean just don't put up your page and forget about it. Interact, engage with people. There will be messages, reply to the messages.
Be responsive. Definitely.
Yes, and be nice when you're being I mean, you might get messages at three o'clock in the morning. You're not expected to reply at three o'clock in the morning
Unless you're.
Unless you're open. If you say open all hours, then yeah, you do sort of have to, but you've got the automations that you get set up there right, Melanie? What's your view on the automated reply of "we'll be back shortly"
It really depends on which platforms you're using. As you say, some platforms have automations and chat bots and that sort of thing. And so if you're having that type of automation, it can even say, look, we're not open at this time. You can catch us open between certain hours, or it could just be a chat button on like a messenger that you can now add onto your websites and fulfil any frequently asked questions, which actually is massively helpful. That's a useful tool to have. But what you've got to do first and foremost is manage your clients, your customers expectations. Their expectations may be different from the ones you have, and you have to work out what your competitors are doing. And if your direct competitors are open all hours, there's an expectation that you're going to be open all hours. If their customer expectations are is that most people in the industry respond within the day, you know, you've got to do the same. You know, there's an expectation that we all have. So customer service, in my opinion, is if you're placing yourself out there, then you have to expect to respond to questions and queries it privately or publicly.
Yeah. And in terms of Twitter, for example, that would be a direct message or D.M. or it would be replying with the inside the tweet. You know, if you're mentioned in a tweet, you'll get the notification. You might have it turned on for your emails as well. So you'll get notified double but reply. And even if you can't help them, you might know somebody who can and you can refer them on to them. If, though, you say that you're open all hours and you're in where we are GMT, you could hire somebody, outsource the other hours to other time zones.
That's not on.
Yeah. You can have somebody in Australia, which is the opposite. You know, there are thirteen, twelve, thirteen hours ahead of us. So they could do all your night shift while you're sleeping and then you do the day shift. I mean that's also something that people are known to do.
Yeah. So I mean you can use chatbot so you can use virtual assistants or if you've got an international team, you know, even better, I follow the likes of Mari Smith and Kim Ghast and they do have international teams and you can bet your life that they're open all hours.
Yeah, so I remember.
But expectations, expectations, expectations isn't?.
Yeah. And I remember when Facebook first did the responsiveness part where if you reply within a certain number of minutes, you get a little green tech. And everyone was all, oh, I'm going to lose my green tech overnight, what am I going to do? And they started panicking. And it's really not I mean, people have left that behind. And the large part. At least I have I don't
I'm feeling old fashioned now because I've managed to maintain that for myself and my clients for a long time.
Wow, that's really great. But I mean, it wouldn't put me off. That's what I mean. It wouldn't let me off contacting the company if it didn't have a responsiveness or if it says usually replies within one day, then you expect as what Melanie was saying, you know, measure their expectations. You expect to get a reply a day later.
And there is certain expectations and different platforms for customer service. And depending on the complaint, if it's a very serious complaint, one that you can actually put out publicly, like maybe on Twitter, then I would expect a response very quickly.
Yes. Yes. There are lots of things that people go to Twitter specifically to complain about in terms of customer service. You've got your broadband, your telephone service, your TV service, you know, all your Skype, Netflix, et cetera. People go to Twitter because they know that they're going to get a response quickly. And they respond, the companies respond quickly because they know that everybody else is watching what they're doing and all their other clients, if they go in and search for, you know, Netflix complaint or BT complaint or Aircom complaint or it's just called air, isn't it? But I'm showing my age now. But you go in, you do search and you do see, you know, how quickly do these guys reply? And it helps to know that they have replied, even if it's a couple of minutes later, a couple of hours later, at least, you know that there's somebody there that can reply to your query or complaint or your problem when you're there. That's on the consumer side. We always like to see that. So, Melanie, when you have your clients and they're asking questions or queries or they have a problem with a section of your service, say that they're missing a document or they're there and they haven't been able to see their ads analytics, how do you ask them to contact you? Do you ask them to say, sent me an email, contact me on my website, use the chatbot, what do you tell your clients?
I find a personal response is better than going to chatbox because I am a one-person band. I can't sort of send them off to somebody else. I don't have a VA. So I would personally send them to my email address, which I monitor pretty much whilst I'm awake. If I'm conscious, I monitor. I mean, you know, there's apps that measure how many times you pick up your phone.
Yeah,
I stop looking at it because I was embarrased.
Think it does get bad. Yeah, we have a ticketing system. We have a specialised email address that we ask our clients to send questions through, too. But obviously there's going to be one or two. If they're not at their emails or they don't have their emails on their phone, they'll go to Facebook, they'll go to Twitter and ask questions. And that's you know, you can't force your clients or force your customers or your potential customers to go to the one place that you would like them to go to. But you can suggest, like if you're selling products, you can suggest all RFA keys are on our website. If they can't find the answer there, then sent me a message. You know, private message is always nicer to get them privately rather than them blasting you on your actual page.
Well, absolutely. And you have a real job responding effectively to it then, because you nine times out of ten, they're putting up something relatively personal when you can't come back personal information, do, you know, carry the answer. So when dealing with complaints, especially public ones, I know it looks like people are bottling it, but you kind of always say, let's take this off to private message and we deal with this for you.
Yeah, but at least if you put it there. But at least if you put it there that you're set, you know, that it's visible to other people, that it's on your page saying, I see you, I will listen to you, but just not here, then at least other people will know. OK, so she's not just deleting the message and walking away. You know what I mean?
Yeah,I do
You show that you show that you're there, that you're you are willing to respond, but just not publicly, which is I mean, if people some people reply publicly and you're sort of going that should never have been sent.
You know, there are times when you have to respond publicly as well.
Just make sure to take a deep breath first.
Yeah.
Just take a deep breath before replying, walk away for ten minutes, gather your thoughts, gather because sometimes that can be quite personal attacks. You know, depending on the business, depending on what it is that you do, you could find yourself being or feeling attacked because your business, your baby, your you know, it's very personal to each and every individual.
And it doesn't matter how long you established either how big you are or if you have a direct interaction with your clients and you see somebody making an attack about the accounts department or, you know, sometimes it's an accounts issue or a problem in that respect, but it's still your business.
Yeah. And just remember. Yeah, and just remember, people are 100 times more likely to leave a bad review than to leave a good review
Anything else is just bad reviews.
Yeah. Yeah. And in that case I would recommend turning off the reviews, you know, leaving them that they can contact you in other forms but not there. But thankfully, we've only had good reviews on our Google my business haven't we?.
We have so far, yes. Just in case you're feeling freshly inspired, you're more than welcome to check out our Google my business account and add to our flowing five star reviews.
Yeah,
you know, we wanted to discuss customer service because there was an expectation that all of us put upon ourselves when we put in a business out there and people expect the same of all of us as well. So if you're expecting the say "did" to respond to a complaint, people on their Facebook page or to or on their Twitter account, let's say,
Can explain what the "DID" is?
Oh. Of course, you up in Northern Ireland, isn't? That's an electronics company down here. So you would get your TVs and, you know, anything remotely electronic.
So for the UK audience, that would be like Currys PC World and for our American audience, that would be Best Buy.
Is that Best Buy?
Yeah.
And so you'd expect any sort of serious complaint about electronics to actually have a response fairly quickly, especially large companies like Best Buy and Currys and. You know, although you may not be very big as a brand yourself, you may be a sole trader. There's still an expectation.
Yeah, there's almost the same pressure on a small business, especially if it's not like in your case, it's not. Melanie Boylen. You know, you do have a brand "Stamp" social media training. So it's not just people might not think, oh, it's just one person until they get to know you and know that it's just you. You know, there is that if it's your name and even though Marie Smith is just her name, you know, she has a team behind her, you know, so there's there's there's those differences that people don't take into consideration or don't think that they need to take into consideration when sending in a complaint. You know, they expect air to give just as good or, you know, they expect the little guys to give just as good a service as the big guys like Air or the big guys like BTE or Verizon or I'm trying to think of different ones in different countries. But, you know, you do expect the little one, you know, the ones that are just coming out to have just as good customer service, if not better than the big guys.
So, yeah, I think we've we've probably discussed this to death now and stuff, but it is an important area to cover. And yes, it was actually a topic that was suggested to us to cover. So here we are. I hope you found it useful. And we'd love to hear your feedback on customer complaints and customer service. Any experiences you've had that you'd like to share
good as well as bad.
Well, yes, please.
Yeah. Yeah.
And, you know, we're back each week with some new novel ideas. So find us on all of our social platforms and send us your comments and your voice messages.
Yes. We'll be back next week for more. Good bye
bye.