10 Social Customer Service Tips

customer product requests, it becomes vitally important to know if it's a $10 billion customer or a $1 million customer. Buying power has a lot to do with how you should respond," Pombriant says. "The customer's influence also plays a big role."

Additionally, as they do with their other customer service channels, companies should track and record each customer's social interaction history to give agents insight into previous issues, sentiment level, interaction frequency, and previous agent replies.

#8: Stay on the customer's preferred channel

Know that if a customer wanted to talk on the phone, she would have called the company in the first place. Unless she agrees to it or suggests a change in venue, don't force it.

At the same time, though, it is important to be mindful of the customer's privacy. Because it's unreasonable to expect customers to relay personal information in a Facebook post or to post their credit card information to Twitter, companies should be prepared to move a conversation to a private and secure channel, such as the phone or Web chat, when needed to keep some information out of the public domain.

#9: Post, don't just reply

Companies can be proactive with their social customer service by posting useful information, such as product updates, tips to improve usability, and links to knowledge base articles, to keep followers engaged and in the know about the company and all it has to offer. Social media, Fluss argues, should be used "to build your brand and support your marketing initiatives, not just on a defensive basis."

By keeping a Twitter feed or Facebook page updated, an organization can reduce inbound call traffic at a time when a particular issue might cause a spike in calls, as in a utility that experiences an outage, for example.

#10: Make performance a priority

Companies need to measure, report on, and take action on service level agreements, key performance indicators, and supervisory data to ensure that customer service remains at the center of their social customer care efforts. "There are lots of dynamics at play in social media," Fluss warns. "So you have to have service levels that are appropriate for the channel."

Those metrics could also include revenue and sales lead generation, call deflection, Net Promoter Scores, or customer loyalty and retention, Pombriant notes.

But in the end, the best way for a company to measure the effect of its social efforts is to look at overall customer sentiment. "Every company has its detractors. You want to minimize the number of yours," Pombriant states.

While it all sounds very complicated, it's really not, most would agree, as long as companies treat social media as just another customer service channel. "Organizations don't need one strategy for the contact center, one for the Web, another for mobile, and one for social media," says Andrew McNair, Dimension Data's head of global benchmarking. "They need a single, unified strategy for customer contact across all channels, for all purposes."

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News Editor Leonard Klie can be reached at lklie@infotoday.com.

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