If you want to use Facebook for customer service, it’s essential that you bear in mind that speed and availability of service is an important part of the customer experience. There’s no point offering “live chat” if there’s never anyone available to chat, and there’s no point having a call back or email response service if it your staff can never meet response time targets. You might as well stick with a contact us form and a telephone number for enquiries.
If you want to use Facebook for customer service, here are 3 questions to ask yourself first:
What you want?
What type of service do you want to offer? If you want to offer help via Facebook because it’s where your clients already go for help – what are they asking?
- Will customers be able to live chat with you via Messenger?
- Do you want a bot that can have conversations with clients automatically?
- Should you have a customised “Contact us” portal rather than messaging via Facebook?
- Would you rather drive traffic back to your website?
Facebook makes it easy to set most of these up automatically. If you know your clients, you probably already know which method they’re most likely to want. If not, why not ask them?
Who will staff it?
What type of enquiries are you expecting to get OR How do you want to use Facebook as a contact point?
- If you’re expecting that most queries will be from existing customers:
- Make sure you’re getting all the information you’re going to need from them at the start of the interaction
- Include relevant information in your FAQ
- Make sure that customers can easily be routed to their Customer Service Representative if necessary
- If you’re expecting that most contacts via Facebook will be complaints:
- Make sure you’ve got customer service experts manning the portal
- Make sure that the people manning the service have the authority to act
- Have a written complaints procedure that includes logging the issue in a complaints log which is regularly reviewed by senior staff.
- If you’re expecting that most contacts via Facebook will be product or service enquiries
- Have sales staff monitoring the portal
- Make sure all staff are sure of who should answer which queries
- If you’re expecting it’ll mostly be existing customers looking to place orders or chase orders, then have Customer Service Reps managing the chat
- If you’re likely to have a mixture of people contacting you – then staff it with customer service generalists who can answer basic questions (where’s my order, how much does XXXX cost, my product arrived with a defect) and pass more complicated questions on to relevant staff to get back to your customers.
- Carefully consider using a bot to deal with simple and regular queries.
- Don’t forget to set up the automatic Messenger responses so your clients know that you want to hear from them.
How will you measure it?
Metrics are incredibly important in customer service. Not so much to measure staff performance, but to measure the customer experience. Some of the things you should consider tracking are:
- Time from initial contact to first response
- Time from initial contact to completion of inquiry
- How many people have had to handle the inquiry
- Which contact method is having the best results for you and your customers
- Perform a random customer service survey or a “how did we do” contact a few days after the issue has been resolved to measure client satisfaction.
Most of these are things that you should be doing for all customer service portals. However, if you use Facebook for customer service it increases the urgency, as customers forced to wait will start broadcasting their dissatisfaction across their network, via online reviews and through negative comments on your wall.
