How to Use Facebook for Customer Service

Do you want to provide better customer service on Facebook? In this post, you will learn how to use Facebook for customer service.

You will discover how to use Facebook and Facebook Messenger as valuable social customer care tools and how to use these platforms to keep your customers happy.

Why Use Facebook and Facebook Messenger for Customer Service?

Messaging apps have become the perfect avenue to engage with your customers and prospects. According to Social Media Examiner, in 2015, the number of registered messaging app users was 25% larger than that of social media. The same website says Facebook Messenger is now overshadowing even China’s WeChat, which has dominated the Chinese messaging market with 600 million monthly active users. It is fast, mobile and efficient, making it an excellent tool for business/customer interactions and a valuable customer care platform.

According to this post, Facebook Messenger is the perfect platform to implement conversational marketing, one of the most effective ways to build customer relationships. Conversational marketing also increases conversion rates and builds brand loyalty through an omnichannel experience. But that’s not the only upside of Facebook messenger. Let’s dive into a few more benefits in the section below.

With over a billion users on each of these platforms, you will find your target audience there. So it is wise to consider providing the best customer care you can on these platforms.

How to Use Facebook and Facebook Messenger for Social Customer Service

1. Create a Facebook Business Page.

The first step in providing customer care on Facebook is to create a Facebook page for your business. A Facebook page differs from the typical Facebook profile that you have when you open a Facebook account. With a Facebook page, you get access to various tools and features not available to others, e.g. Facebook Insights. With your page, you can create targeted adverts on Facebook to draw potential clients. You can also reply to questions or complaints on your page.

Your Facebook Page is where you’ll post updates, respond to comments, and message clients. Make your Facebook Page engaging by choosing a recognisable profile photo, crafting a strong CTA, and writing an appealing “About” section. These factors will make your customers feel welcome and comfortable, reaching out to you with questions. At this point, let me invite you to like our Mauco Enterprises Facebook Page.

2. Use Facebook Messenger.

Facebook Messenger is direct, efficient, and private, which is why many clients reach out to brands through this channel (versus posting on a Page). You can sync your live chat tool to your Facebook Messenger, so your team can manage messages from one central location without having to switch back and forth between the Facebook platform. With your Facebook Business Page, you can set up a custom Messenger bot to start and respond to messages that customers send you. Making it a vital sales tool.

The first step in providing customer care on Facebook is to create a Facebook page for your business. Click To Tweet

3. Provide Proper Training for Community Managers

To ensure consistent and effective social customer care, companies should create a simple process for handling complaints. Ideally, ensure you empower your social networks marketers, community managers and social customer service representatives to make their own intelligent decisions up to a certain point.

Your simple process for handling complaints may include:

Internal checklists
Chat scripts
a list of FAQs with brief, helpful answers to each question.

When a unique customer support question or issue arises for which there is no planned response, it provides an opportunity to gather your team around to:

Answer the question and explain the philosophy behind the answer.
Make sure everyone understands the thought process.
Ask one person to write it in the manual as a resource for marketers and your customer care team for handling similar issues from now on.
Let everybody know they can resolve a similar problem next time.

For customer care benchmarks, look to companies like Amazon, Zappos, Apple and so forth as examples.

If you’re a solopreneur or you work with a small team, adopting a similar process could help you significantly grow your company and gain a strategic advantage over your competitors. Learn to work with your team to establish guidelines for handling customer support issues on their own.

4. Respond Promptly.

In providing customer care on Facebook, timing is critical. It would be best to answer comments and messages as fast as possible, even after business hours. If you let that much time go by before responding to customer inquiries or complaints, you do so at your peril. In the social media marketing world, two hours feels like two days! Your Facebook Business Page even displays your average response time for your followers and customers to see. So if you’re lousy or excellent at responding to comments or messages, your visitors will know your response rate. And many customers expect a response within the hour!

To avoid any embarrassment, read and understand your customer’s complaint. If you are not clear on something, it is better to ask questions. Take the conversation away from Facebook inbox if you know it’s too complicated for the platform. Another alternative is to use Facebook’s private messaging system for pages to send a private message to the aggrieved person. In worst-case scenarios, you can channel the discussion through email or telephone to handle the situation better.

When someone posts a compliment or customer concern about your brand, thank them. Highlight the praise both online and offline through the relevant channels.

Remember, success is not a one-person show. Share the compliments with your customer service reps and staff since everyone’s effort has made the company a success story.

Remember that your Facebook page is not an agony column for all your fans to come and pour their frustration. Using your page as an agony column could hurt your brand. Instead, your Facebook page is to provide a human “face” for your brand on social media. There’s no need to wash all your dirty linen in public.

5. Invest in and Use the Right Third-party Tools.

Everyone in your customer base is probably on Facebook, making it a natural place for customers to make requests, and yes, voice complaints. So you need to invest in and use the right third-party tools to keep track of requests and customer service questions without having to switch back and forth from your email inbox to support and to Facebook. Some tools also give your customer service team the ability to respond to posts and comments from within the tool, allowing your team to track service performance and share queries if needed.

6. Be the First to Address Product Issues and Give Your Fans Updates.

Do you have some not-so-glorious news to share about your business, like service downtime or when you’ve made a mistake? Acknowledge your mistakes. Fast! Your followers will respect you for it! Use your Facebook page to spread the word about product issues through your post.

As the saying goes, the customer is always right. So apologise and accept responsibility whenever you goof. Please offer what you can to appease the customer and make things right with them. Do not use your Facebook page as a platform for arguing with your fans.

Show your willingness to take responsibility for mistakes and complaints in your post. Share information with your users and keep them in the know even after the problem has been fully resolved. It is a vital part of your social media customer service and customer service strategy.

7. Be Generous to Your Fans

Show appreciation for your fans. And always commend them for interacting and engaging with your page. There are many ways to reward your fans and followers on Facebook by giving them public props, shoutouts, gifts and company swag. It’s an essential step toward building loyal fans and super fans.

Benefits of Facebook Messenger for Customer Service

Facebook Messenger is a real-time messaging app built into the largest social media platform in the world. It’s fast, mobile, and has some outstanding features for managing conversations.

It is an outstanding customer service tool you can use to help reduce labour and software costs. Instead of paying for live chat software, Messenger can substitute in its place for free. And Facebook Messenger includes customisable chatbots, so they needed fewer reps to manage incoming conversations.

Your Facebook Business Page even displays your average response time for your followers and customers to see. Click To Tweet

You can integrate Facebook Messenger with most CRMs and help desks. That way, you have a unified inbox and something already recorded incoming customer conversations as support tickets, so your reps can track and monitor case progress without manually transferring information.

While these are all valuable benefits for your business, be aware of some limitations to Facebook Messenger.

Facebook Pages and Facebook Messenger Limitations

There are some cons to using Facebook as the frontline for your customer service channel.

Not everyone uses Facebook.

Believe it or not, not everyone has a Facebook account. So offer live chat, telephone or email as another customer support option for these percentages of your audience. It is not an enormous obstacle to overcome, but it means managing your resources more efficiently for small businesses.

Negative experiences are easy to share.

While it’s great to engage people on social media, the risk you run is that negative experiences are easy to share. If someone is unhappy about something, they’re likely to make it known where everyone can see it. Even if the mishap takes place in a private chat, it’s easy for people to take a screenshot and post it to their timeline since they’re already on Facebook’s interface.

Wrapping Up!

The key to success in providing customer care on Facebook is consistent. Be at your best when engaging with your fans on Facebook. Respond as fast as possible.

Being at your best will leave a lasting impression on the person’s mind that you view them as valuable.

In conclusion, your social media account is not your property. You can lose your account if you do anything that is not permitted by the social network.

You stand the risk of losing all your data on these social networks. Channel the bulk of your customer service activities to your website. Your website is your property, and you have more control over it.

Are you using Facebook for customer service? Tweet me at @ademolaabimbola or @mauconline to share your experience. If you found this post of value, share it with your friends using the social media share buttons below. Need help to turn your Facebook fans and followers into customers? Click here to Schedule a consultation.

Do you have any questions?

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