Building Customer Loyalty

While researching recent activities in the social media world, I found an article on SocialMediaToday that I feel can relate to my future career in Graphic Design and Public Relations. This article focuses on ways to create customer loyalty with social support.

It is becoming increasingly common that if you have an unhappy customer, you could lose more than just that customer and a few of their friends. With the rapid growth of social media, the word of dissatisfaction can spread like wildfire. In the design industry, the client and their audience are the key aspect to success. If you make them unhappy they can jump on Twitter, Facebook, etc. and spread the word for the service they received. As bad as it may be they can drop your client basis rapidly and if you work for any firm, the end solution may not be what you desire.

Just one angry comment can take a while to recover from. According to Chan, 88% of customers are influenced by customer service reviews. They are also ready to jump on adding reviews, especially the ones that can ruin a person’s career.

The following are six tips to delivering support on social media.

1.       Use a monitoring tool to catch these complaints:

A monitoring tool can catch the mentions you get from your client base on social media. You may also get real time alerts for your company and product names. This ultimately saves time when you are searching to find out what people say about your service.

2.      Don’t ignore the complaints:

I find it shocking that companies would ignore their online complaints. It is a crucial element that you respond to these complaints in a timely manner. Giving your clients that response can help you from losing the client. They want to know that you care about their needs and wants, and that you will try to solve the problem as soon as possible.

3.      Have real people manage your social accounts:

Copy-and-pasted responses can be one of the worse things you can do when dealing with a dissatisfied customer. It will become annoying to customers if the realize they are not talking to a real person, so hire humans to talk to them. The personal aspect is huge when it comes to solving a problem.

4.      Use the opportunity to build rapport:

In the end, do not be afraid to respond and try to have fun with it at all possible. Try to connect with the customers.

5.      Continue the discussion in private, if necessary:

It is important to know when to make a conversation private, or take it off social media altogether. Some information just cannot be shared publicly.

6.      Create an efficient process for transferring queries:

Make it so that if you must transfer a customer from person to person that the process is quick and harmless. They want to know that when you are taking their time that you are explaining the situation to the next person. Customers get tired of continually repeating the service they need.

In the end, you need to build customer loyalty. Believe it or not they need to know you care!