Social media use and networking are some of the most popular online activities today. As of January 2020, it was estimated that global social media usage stood at 3.6 billion people, with the number projected to hit the 4.41 billion mark by 2025. Amid the prevailing COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent social distancing measures the world over, businesses have been forced to rapidly shift their marketing strategies from the traditional marketing mediums to social media platforms.
Whilst, the explosion of social media marketing allows businesses to reach their customers in their area of the domain, it also means that they need to create more content to meet the needs of a diverse customer base, including the older generations. For brands that don’t have the necessary social media marketing and support know-how, social media outsourcing can help bridge this skills gap.
If you’re looking for long-term workers familiar with social media and chat support, you have come to the right place. In this article, we are going to look at the basics of remote social media support the different types of social media marketing services and the benefits of hiring a virtual social media customer care agent.
But before we drill into the minute details, let’s take a look at the reasons why you should consider outsourcing your social media customer services.
Why You Should Consider Outsourcing Your Social Media Customer Service
When it comes to social media management outsourcing, there are several benefits that your business can take advantage of. They include:
Saves Your Business Time
The time-saving aspect is one of the primary reasons why you should consider remote social media customer service solutions. Social media customer support is a task that requires constant attention, with studies showing that 42% of customers expect a reply on social media within 60 minutes. As a business owner, the last thing you want is to leave your customers in the dark just because you have to attend a board meeting or simply because you don’t have enough personnel.
Expert Assistance
Hiring a third-party contractor to handle your social media communication is an efficient way to gain new business leads and build a loyal customer base. Along with that, managing social media accounts for a business is not an easy task, as it entails a lot including:
- Creating and managing quality content. Customer support cuts across different tiers, and creating quality content falls under Tier 0 support. This support tier helps your customers understand your products and services, and creating high-quality content gives you a competitive edge in the marketplace.
- Communicating with customers. Research has shown that more than 50% of customers in the US reach their favorite brands via social media. And while at it, they’re able to ask their inquiries about the products or services, as well as communicate with their favorite vendors via their social media accounts.
- Launching ad campaigns. Social media ad campaigns are the best way for your business to reach its target market. Accessing even a small portion of the 3.6 billion social media users globally can give you an upper edge over your competitors.
Focus on Core Business Activities
Another reason why you should outsource social media is that it allows you to focus on core business activities. As indicated above, juggling between different social media platforms, communicating with customers and answering all their inquiries, creating engaging content plans, and running ad campaigns can be time-consuming. Remote social media support services give you the time to focus on more important things like your product development and team management.
What Makes Good Social Media Support Services?
Depending on whom you ask, the phrase “good” is relative. However, for a social media support service to be categorized as good, it should have several fundamental components. They include:
Faster Turnaround
When it comes to social media support services, faster responses can never be overemphasized.
Nothing frustrates customers more than seeking clarification online only to receive a response a few weeks later. For this reason, your business should be manned 24/7 to ensure that your customers receive responses when most needed.
Transparent
Just because you’ve promised customers a faster turnaround time doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll always fix their issues in a standardized timeframe. Instead of giving false promises, you should try to explain how long it will take for their issues to be resolved—even if it means telling them you don’t know how long it will take.
Leverages Complaints to Pinpoint Weak Points
A good social media support strategy should also use online brand mentions in the form of complaints, questions, or comments to identify the company’s weak points. Today, there are multiple social media marketing tools like socialmention.com and mention.com that help businesses search for online mentions and use them to improve social media customer service.
Consistency
A good social media customer support service is also consistent. If a customer airs their complaint via a Facebook or Twitter comment, they’re doing it there for a reason. For this reason, it would be disrespectful to begin your response by asking them to communicate via a different medium.
Follow Up
After the customer has been assisted, good social media support also tries to follow up. A simple “How are things going?” let your customer know that you take their issues seriously and are always on standby to help them with any further issues in the future.
Different Types of Social Media Support Services That Omnichannel Support Agents Can Help with
Not all companies have the time and resources to establish and maintain a well-equipped, customer support center. Here at Omnichannel Support, we help businesses solve customers’ issues and deliver a superior, rapid customer experience across different social media platforms. Our areas of specialization in light of social media support include:
- Facebook customer service support
- Customer support services on Twitter
- Outsource lead generation
- Youtube customer care
- Linkedin customer support service
- Building an omnichannel contact center
Whether you are looking to establish a social media customer support service in all the above-mentioned platforms, or any other popular platforms, our agents have got you covered:
Industries That We Serve by Providing Social Media Customer Support
For many years, Omnichannel Support has been providing remote social media customer support to several clients across different industries including:
- Information technology
- Finance
- Food
- Healthcare
- Hospitality
- Aerospace
- Agriculture
- Automotive
- Customs
- Brokerage
- Defense
- Energy
- Education
- Entertainment
- Logistics
- Manufacturing
- Multimedia
- Public Sector
- Pharmaceutical
- Retail & eCommerce
- Telecommunications
- Insurance
- Real Estate
- Legal
What Makes Our Social Media Support Services Different from Others?
We would be here all day if we started giving you a blow-by-blow account of what sets our services apart from the rest. So, we are going to give you the top five reasons:
- Personal approach. Offer personalized services that go beyond canned and automated responses to meet all your customer’s needs.
- Effective support tools and technologies. Our agents use the best and up-to-date tools and technologies in their daily work.
- Expertise. We have (number of years) expertise in delivering superb social media customer support costs effectively.
- 24/7 customer support. Interact with your customers on a 24/7/365 basis.
- Multi-lingual support. Our social media customer care agents speak all major languages across the major markets.
How We Recruit Remote Social Media Support Specialists
Recruiting a social media support specialist is a piece of cake for Omnichannel Support. Our hiring process has five basic steps.
- Identifying your needs. Our hiring process begins by partnering with you to establish your hiring needs and the skills required to fill the vacant position.
- Selection of social media customer support agents. Next, we will begin selecting the right candidates from our large pool of candidates. After settling on specific candidates, we will send you their resumes for consideration.
- Screening. After choosing the most fitting candidates, we will make arrangements on conducting interviews via video conferencing or Skype.
- Contract signing. After the screening process, you can proceed to hire customer support agents that best fit your positions. At this point, we will also establish social media customer support staff workflow, the start date, and sign the service agreement.
- Induction. The final step in our recruitment process is the induction of remote social media customer support members.