3 Easy Ways to Speed Up Your Social Media Response Time (to Impress Customers And Shame Your Competition)
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3 Easy Ways to Speed Up Your Social Media Response Time (to Impress Customers And Shame Your Competition)
Want to respond faster to your customers on social media?
In a world where customer service support via social media is now expected by customers (and preferred over phone and email), just being on social and responding whenever isn’t enough. Whether on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or wherever … customers want speedy replies!
And while instantaneous replies are beyond the scope of most businesses, studies show that the majority of customers expect a same-day response from brands on social media.
The advantage of fast customer response times on social media
And when a significant majority of brands don’t even bother to respond to customer feedback on social media, you doing so has some major advantages:
Improved customer loyalty: research by Gartner found that customers are much more likely to be loyal to a brand if their service expectations are met.
A competitive advantage: Offering quick response times on social media stops customers from defecting to rival brands (who are just a DM or a tweet away!), and distinguishes your brand as one to like and trust.
In this post, I'll share with you three simple strategies to speed up your customer response time on social media, Let’s go!
Fast social media response times tip #1: merge your queries into one tool
Fast social media response times tip #1: merge your queries into one tool
The likelihood is that you're active on several social media platforms. It might not seem it at the time, but bouncing in between them all to handle questions from users on each is a huge time sink in the long run.
So, consolidate your social media communications into a single platform where you can respond to messages from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. etc. all at once, saving you a ton of time and energy, and improving your response time as well.
The list of software available to help you do this is growing all the time, but some of the biggest and most popular players include Hootsuite and Sprout Social.
Fast social media response times tip #2: use saved or suggest replies
Fast social media response times tip #2: use saved or suggest replies
Every business has a certain bunch of questions that get asked by customers ALL the time (opening hours, returns policy, menu items, etc.). So rather than replying to such queries with a custom-typed answer each time, have a set of saved or suggested replies handy.
You'll probably have to tweak some of the wording to fit the customer's exact enquiry from time to time (and a smattering of personalisation always goes down well with customers), but that's still much faster than composing a reply from scratch.
Some of the aforementioned tools include the option to save replies within the software, or else you can save a file on your desktop where the answers are just a copy and paste away.
Fast social media response time tip #3: Tell customers where they can get help fastest
Fast social media response time tip #3: Tell customers where they can get help fastest
If you're going to give your customers the speediest response on social media, they need to know where and when is best to contact you.
Use your social media bio to spell out what hours you're available to help (if monitoring constantly), or set expectations (we aim to reply within X hours!).
Fast social media response time: Conclusion
One last piece of advice I'd give about making sure you're heading in the right direction speed-wise, is to track and measure your response times. Set a starting benchmark and work to improve it, based on the number of queries you receive and how fast you respond to them.
The bottom line is that the faster you can respond to your customers and followers on social media, the better.
And if you approach the way you handle customer queries with some of the strategic and data-driven methods listed above, you'll be well on the way to impressing customers and outgunning your competition.
What are your best strategies for monitoring and replying quickly to customers on social media? Let me know in the comments below!
Andrew Macarthy is a social media consultant and the author of the #1 Amazon Web Marketing Bestseller, 500 Social Media Marketing Tips.
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