Building a Social Customer Service Strategy From Scratch

By 2013, customers had already decided social media was a legitimate place to complain, ask questions and expect an answer, whether or not a business had planned for it. Building an actual strategy, instead of reacting whenever someone tweeted at you, came down to a handful of concrete steps.

Step 1: Find out where customers are already talking. Before setting anything up, search Twitter and Facebook for your business name, product names and common misspellings. Most businesses in 2013 were surprised how much conversation was already happening without a single reply from the company.

Step 2: Decide who owns the response. Social customer service falls into a gap between marketing, which usually runs the accounts, and support, which usually has the answers. Pick one team to own it, even if that’s one person part-time, so a complaint doesn’t sit unanswered while departments figure out whose job it is.

Step 3: Set a response time target and make it public if you can. Comcast’s early “Comcast Cares” Twitter account had shown years earlier that a fast, visible reply changes the entire tone of a complaint. A realistic target for most small businesses in 2013 was same-business-day; a few hours was better if staffing allowed it.

Step 4: Write a short escalation path. Decide in advance what gets handled publicly (a shipping question, a general complaint) versus what moves to a private channel (order numbers, account details, anything that takes more than two replies to resolve). Reply publicly first, then invite the customer to direct message, so other people watching see that the business responds.

Step 5: Train whoever’s answering on tone, not just facts. A support reply on Twitter reads completely differently from a support email. Short, human, specific responses did better than scripted corporate language, and a defensive reply to a public complaint tended to make things worse, not better.

Step 6: Use a real tool once volume justifies it. Once mentions became too frequent to track manually, tools built for this, like Sprout Social or Conversocial, let a team monitor multiple accounts, assign replies and track response times in one place instead of refreshing a search feed all day.

Step 7: Measure something besides “did we reply.” Track average response time, resolution rate and, where possible, whether a resolved complaint turned into a repeat customer. That last number is the one that justifies the resourcing to whoever’s approving the budget.

Step 8: Close the loop internally. A complaint about a recurring product problem or a confusing checkout page is free product feedback. Route it back to the team that can fix it, not just to whoever answered the tweet.

None of this required a large team or a big budget in 2013. What it required was treating the public reply as seriously as a phone call, because for a growing number of customers, it had effectively replaced one.