- Be personal and, if it fits your brand, casual. Don't use standardized answers.
- People have quickly become accustomed to instant answers in the social media environment. If your customer sends you a message, it's important to respond within a few hours at most. This is even more important for posts on your wall, especially negative ones. If it is not possible to provide a concrete answer in your first response, you need to give the customer at least an approximate time when you can provide a satisfactory solution.
- Don't assume that simply answering the query will solve the problem. Do not hesitate to contact the customer a few hours or days later to check that they are satisfied.
- Respond to positive comments as well, it shows that you value the customer's time.
- Respond to negative posts with a cool head. Address the customer by name, but don't overdo it with the frequency so you don't come across as an annoying salesperson on the phone.
- Do not delete comments unless they contain profanity. Your other customers have the opportunity to see how you solve various problems through your posts. If you delete, you risk a flurry of censorship accusations.
- If you're a larger company, prepare an internal list including all colleagues and their areas of expertise so that everyone can easily track down who to contact if they don't know how to respond to a customer.
- If you make a mistake, don't be afraid to admit it publicly. It takes a long time to earn a customer's trust, but you can lose it right away.
- This may sound trivial, but many companies forget this: you can answer frequently recurring questions in the Q&A section, like we do.
- If you really have a lot of questions, you can create a separate page for complaints or plug in an app to help you with customer service. You can also set up automatic replies that you can use, for example, on the weekend.