Customer Service and Facebook. Those two terms generally don’t associate well with each other, and can be a potential snag for marketers and brands.
Whether you are a new brand or an established brand, customer service should be a priority.
Here are some tips that allow you to manage your Facebook Fan Page and pay attention to your customer’s needs at the same time.
#1 Keep The Majority Of It Off Facebook
Some of you have probably already figured this out for yourselves, but Facebook is not the ideal customer service platform.
Depending on how large your brand is and how much time and resources you have to dedicate to customer service, you can deal with customer support on Facebook. We’ll touch more on this later.
For the majority of brands with larger customer bases, outsourcing customer service is the solution, and well worth the investment.
Getting a platform that specifically focus on customer service, such as Zendesk, Lithium, or Parature can be the transition your brand needs from being overwhelmed by customer feedback and questions to managing a clearly defined customer support team.
If you are feeling overwhelmed, then look into some customer support platforms.
#2 Have Your Fans Do It For You
Perhaps you have experienced fans answering questions or replying to negative comments on your Fan Page.
If you haven’t, you will, and it’s absolutely wonderful.
These are the fans that you want to attract to your Fan Page. Not only do they provide answers backed by personal experience, but they can save your business some potential money.
Since these fans bring value to your business, it would be nice to reward them and incentivize them. Keep your eyes open for these fans, and try to help them out in some way through discounts or other means. They’re the ones doing you the favor after all!
#3 Keep Your Fan Page Clean
Regardless of the size of your brand, when you promote posts, run Facebook ads, or have a sale, you’re going to get a lot of comments that you don’t want on your Fan Page. I know we do!
I’m not referring to negative comments, but things like chain posts, cursing, and things of that nature. Comments that have nothing to do with the sale or your brand don’t belong on your Fan Page. Period. Here’s an example:
WARNING! Carry on reading! Or you will die, even if you only looked at the word warning! Once there was a little girl called Clarissa, she was ten-years-old and she lived in a mental hospital…
It was much longer than that and actually very graphic, but it gives you the general idea.
Go ahead and delete those!
And if you’re superstitious, don’t worry. I’ve broken many chain posts and I’m fine!
#4 The Face Behind The Brand
Now that we have a clean Fan Page, we can spend some time devoted to replying on Facebook.
Yes, this may sound contradictory to the strategies I’ve listed above but it is good to do this every now and then, and it is especially easy for smaller brands.
Customers appreciate being able to get a direct answer.
Not only does this make it easier for them to get a question answered, but it shows their friends that there is a face behind your brand that is willing to take the time to help out its customers.
Try to do this periodically, or have someone on your team assigned to the task.
#5 Small brand? Use Messages
Larger brands may have this feature turned off, we do, but it sends a message with a very personal feeling to it.
With the messaging feature turned on, people can directly Facebook message your Fan Page.
If you are able, you should take the time to reply to these. Even if the reply directs them to a FAQ that you’ve constructed, it is still a personal reply as long as it doesn’t sound too automated.
Messages can also be a way to get feedback from customers about a product. Listen to your customers and make changes if necessary.
The only downside to messages is that they are private.
No one will be able to see that you’re taking the time to answer questions and helping your customers, but it is still a worthwhile endeavor provided you don’t get overwhelmed with messages.
#6 Build A FAQ
After using the above tactics for some time and monitoring your customer support tickets, you should know what problems your customers run into the most frequent.
Take this opportunity to create a FAQ. In case you didn’t know, that stands for “frequently asked questions”.
Once you’ve gotten a FAQ made, be sure to share the links everywhere you can. Help pages, sales pages, in your products, anywhere someone may think of a relavent question.
This will not only save the customer time because they won’t have to wait for a response, but it will save you time from answering the same questions over and over.
Be sure to update and modify the FAQ as needed.
#7 Don’t Just Focus On The Negative
Be sure to focus some attention to the people leaving positive comments as well.
Take the compliment! Say thank you for it!
This simple gesture helps build and establish your brand identity, and can help shift the “tone” of your wall from a negative to a positive one.
It also will encourage those that leave compliments to come back and leave more in the future.
#8 Keyword Notifications
Some social marketing platforms let you set up alerts for custom keywords.
For instance: you could set up an alert for whenever someone’s comment includes the word “customer service” or “frustrated”. This would let you know exactly when and where someone may need help without having to go through hundreds or thousands of comments.
The only hangup to the keyword notification tactic is that I couldn’t find a tool that let you do this without buying a whole suite of products.
Let me know if you have found something that you have used with success, or we may just have one developed! Would this be helpful?
As always, you can find more tips about Facebook on our website, or try the Timeline Blueprint if you haven’t already.
Thanks for reading guys, and I wish you the best.
