Published by Gorgias
31.08.21
Most companies announce new products and inventory arrivals on social media. It’s a smart move given that social media is where consumers spend the bulk of their online time. More importantly, 57% of consumers will follow a brand because they want to learn about new products or services, and 47% will follow to stay up to date on company news.
What’s more, social commerce is booming! Across the globe, revenue from social commerce will grow 28.4% annually from 2021 to 2028, reaching an eye-popping USD 3,369.8 billion by 2028.
But take care, as where you have customers, you’ll need customer service. If consumers discover your products on Instagram or Facebook, you need to ensure that your customer care reps can answer their queries on those channels. After all, it’s where many consumers make their purchasing decisions.
Here are 5 tips from our partners at Gorgias for extending your customer service to social media:
Tip #1: Don’t wait for a customer to arrive on your website to engage
Respond to customers who ask about your products on the same channel they’re posted. If a customer inquires about your cool new earbuds on Instagram, send them your product info on that same channel. It will increase your sales and ad effectiveness by the equivalent of a 5% increase in ad-spend.
Tip #2: Use macros to respond quickly
Responding to product queries quickly, and correctly on social media, can be a bit of a challenge. It’s not unheard of for a single post or TikTok video to generate thousands of comments and questions, all of which need to be acknowledged quickly, and on-message.
Create macros — or pre-written responses — to routine questions, such as your shipping and returns policy, or whether your clothes run large. Macros make quick work of responding to queries asked on social media.
Tip #3: Automate personalisation via integrations with Shopify data
Deep integrations between your Shopify store and helpdesk platform will allow you to personalise your responses to posts based on any number of data relevant points. For instance, you can leverage a customer’s order history to drive revenue and delight customers.
If a customer comments on your post that they love a pair of pants and your agent sees they’ve ordered them before, you can comment “We love that you love them! DM us for a coupon code to get free shipping on your next order.” Or, if a customer comments that they didn’t like their most recent order, you can refund it in a matter of seconds through your helpdesk, and then reply to the customer and let them know they’ll see a refund shortly, and ask for their feedback on how you can improve for next time.
Tip #4: Centralise all tickets so you can respond to posts quickly
Some third-party helpdesk tools, like Gorgias, will store all the questions and comments your store receives from a consumer in a central location. And because Gorgias merges everything into one platform, if a customer reaches out via live chat and social media, your customer care reps can easily see it’s the same customer and merge those tickets into one, as well as respond on the appropriate channel. This avoids your support team from having two people answer the same question and ensures everything is streamlined. It also means your customer care representative can send a highly relevant response.
What’s more, if a customer requests a change to an order via Instagram (or any other social channel), the customer care rep can edit the order, modify subscriptions, refund payments and notify the customer on Instagram — without ever leaving their helpdesk.
Tip #5: Leverage machine learning to personalise social media experiences
Shoppers appreciate it when brands tailor an experience to their personal tastes. The first step is to identify a customer’s preference through your helpdesk. With Gorgias, built-in machine learning detects and filters comments into buckets based on their intent. So if a customer is a social lead, meaning they have high intent to purchase based on their sentiment, then they’ll automatically be sorted to the social leads bucket, so your team knows to customise their response to one that encourages a purchase.
If you haven’t extended your customer care to social media you’re missing out on a great opportunity to win new customers, increase sales, and demonstrate to the large numbers of people just how brilliant your brand is.
Want to learn more about Gorgias? Get in touch with our team of Shopify experts today!
About Gorgias:
Gorgias is a customer support platform. It allows merchants to handle customer service tasks from one centralised place. From email and live chat to social media and SMS, it makes communicating with your customers as easy as possible.
