How to use facebook as a Customer Service Portal

For any business, customer service is about conversation and resolving conflict, disappointments, handling returns, diffusing customer frustration and anger, and facilitating a satisfactory conclusion for both the customer and your business. Your customer service reputation can be as important to company growth as the actual product or services you provide. And any business owner understands what satisfied customers translate to: return business, excellent referrals, and new customers.

But employee time and efforts utilized for customer service can also detract from profits when excessive hours go into finding resolutions for customers. The expense of this diverted employee time that can be effective in revenue and sales may compound when customer service calls increase.

Facebook, with all the caveats for business promotion and marketing, is now being considered as an effective platform for customer service. There are many aspects of this type of complaint handling that will not only save you time and money—but will create an improved company image to the public and your patrons.

In a case study involving AT&T, the company found that Facebook can be effective for customer service utilization. With more than two million Facebook fans to date, their 2011 deployment of a study pilot using Facebook to manage their customer service proved successful and that even large organizations can make use of this innovative customer service option.

Part of AT&T’s Facebook customer service plan was to prepare their employees to handle the hundreds of requests that would post to their Facebook page each day. It was important to structure their page to accommodate these queries and be sure the Facebook users have a positive customer service experience.

At their Facebook page, AT&T created Notes to assist with customer questions or complaints. Many Facebook business pages underutilize this Notes option, which is a convenient place to assist with customer problems. As other Facebook fans post follow up comments, this provides visible answers or resolutions for other customers to read. There are no specific forms to submit a question or complaint, but Facebook fans are free to join in discussions and post on other people’s comments threads.

AT&T found that utilizing this effective customer service method actually encouraged customers to purchase products after reading about them at their Facebook page. Through tracking sales that originated from Facebook interaction, they found these sales increased their return on investment.

Another interesting branch of AT&T’s Facebook customer service practices is allowing fans to create other pages and groups to allow for conversation based on AT&T’s actual Facebook page. These other groups and pages are available during times employees at AT&T are not online as in during off business hours. Actual AT&T employees will visit these other pages once someone provides assistance—customer to customer, and personally thank the page or group owner who posted the answer. Other businesses would frown on allowing these types of groups in fear incorrect information would be communicated. But AT&T understands clearly the benefit of online communities such as Facebook.

There are several tips for allowing customer service interaction on your Facebook page:

• Make use of the Notes option or a separate section for customer service needs and issues so your main page will not be clogged up with these queries.
• It’s essential that you have the same principles and procedures for your company’s customer service apply to the customer service on your Facebook page.
• Once you create this option, be sure you have employees on hand at all times during your business hours for quick replies to questions posted on your page.
• You may want to consider overlapping employee shifts to accommodate different time zones in the United States and possibly extended shifts for International customers.

Be sure the employees responding to the Facebook questions know how to use Facebook, are already trained in handling customer service complaints, are computer and Facebook savvy, and are connected to the page on a separate screen, computer, or even a company smart phone with a Facebook app that emits a notification for each new posting on your page. Proper responses in a timely manner are essential to keeping this system of customer service operating efficiently. Here is a recent article on “How to train an employee to mediate and monitor your Facebook fan page”

Allow your employees the ability to take notice of customers who post useful comments and thank them, acknowledging their help. These people can be valuable as they post comments on other customer service discussions as a customer who knows—not just an employee far off in an office. This is the beauty of social networking and making use of Facebook as a customer service resource will create a connected group of fans and users who become loyal to your brand.

Categories: Answer , Customer Service Portal , facebook