Three ways to use social media to improve CX by Peter Edwards

Lets start with a couple of statistics: 71% of consumers who receive a quick response from brands are likely to recommend that brand to others and 59% of adults aged 25-34 share poor brand experience online. At a glance, this highlights the importance of social media and how it’s a channel no organisation can afford to ignore when it comes to managing and improving customer experience (CX).

On the surface, social media is a great channel for responding to customers quickly, communicating product offers or announcements and enabling more informal conversations that consumers on social media have come to expect. However, dive a bit deeper and social media can be used for far more than that. Here, we take a look at three uses of social media that will bring value to any CX strategy.

Twitter profiles and Facebook pages are great for providing an additional place for consumers to ask questions or query orders, as are private messages, but this isn’t where the conversation should stop. With 200 million people now members of Facebook groups, they have become a key part of a users experience. This, however, means that many conversations are taking place outside of a˜public view, in separate groups that may discuss brands or particular products. What’s more, the number of people using groups will only further increase as Facebook continues to change its algorithm to prioritise meaningful interactions between friends, family and communities, over brands.

1. Uncover conversations through hidden groups

Organisations therefore need to consider how they can join in the conversation in these groups, representing themselves so that they can learn and improve their products or CX strategy, without trying to sell. It’s important that brands don’t interrupt the conversation in these groups but merely observe to see what can be discovered, and then implemented as a result. The companies that use social media as a place to not only communicate with their customers, but to listen, will be streets ahead with their CX strategies.
As we’ve discussed, social media is not only another channel to communicate with consumers and answer queries, but also to take a step back and listen. For example, a large volume of queries relating to a certain product, service or promotion can inform future decisions. This could be customers struggling with assembly instructions of a new product, for example.

2. Take away data insights

Feeding this insight back to product, design or marketing teams can have a big impact on future strategies and can ensure the same issues aren’t repeated, creating a stronger, seamless CX.

Additionally, is the brand being mentioned indirectly on social media, either through hashtags or without tagging the company in their status update? Both positive and negative feedback provides important insight that organisations should take advantage of; using a social media monitoring or listening tool to gather quantitative insights combined with human intelligence so that the sentiments of posts can be properly analysed - the basis of a winning social media CX strategy.
Organisations often look at what people are posting on social media, which can certainly help to uncover new insights, but they often don’t look at who is posting, commenting or messaging. What sort of social media following do these people have? Are they classified as a social media influencer?

3. Discover new audiences and find influencers

After the Advertising Standards Authority declared that anyone with over 30,000 followers is now considered to be a celebrity, and therefore an influencer, organisations need to understand who their main network is on social media, and what they are trying to communicate to the brand in question.

Understanding this will not only help the marketing team with future influencer or brand strategies, but will also help the CX team to know how to communicate with the audience in order to deliver the best outcomes. Answers to questions such as what language is best to use or what tone might be most suitable, as well as what hours of the day the organisation receives the most contacts on social media, will help to make the CX strategy as robust as it can be.
The continued growth of social media is constantly opening up new avenues to tap into customer insight. And if brands utilise these avenues, and use their presence on these channels the right way, social media will become an even more valuable part of any successful CX strategy.

Social media: more than just another channel

The organisations that use social media as more than a communications tool and as part of the wider omnichannel strategy will quickly see the true benefits.

If you’d like to know more about how social media can be used to improve customer experience, get in touch with our team today.

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