Tips for Managing Customer Relationships on Social Networks

Successfully Managing Customer Relationships is an effective part of shaping your brand image on social networks; this includes handling various complaints and inquiries successfully according to the strategy that has been developed for your CRM.

People are increasingly using social networks to connect with brands. It is also a preferable channel for customers to send complaints on an ongoing basis. In this article, you’ll find a set of tips to help you manage your customer relationships on social networks:

Social CRM is the process that enables you to focus on your organization’s relationships with individual people – whether those are customers, service users, colleagues or suppliers on Social media channels. Usually, CRM focuses on implementing clients and prospects demands, solving the problems they face, and gathering data on the market and consumers on an ongoing basis.

Source: http://www.stylusinc.com/core-problem-solving/ecrm/

The CRM process on social networks includes some practices as follows:

Outreach
Monitoring
Engagement
Post analysis
User analysis
Marketing

After identifying what’s Social CRM process is about; here are a set of tips to enhance your success:

Building Clear Clients Personas

Segmenting your audience and your database on clear marketing personas important to delivering targeted, relevant messages to them. You don’t have to be an organizational freak, but segmenting your contacts, prospects will always help you move better and faster.

There are so many variables to take into account and so many possible ways to segmentation, most prominent are:

Age
Sex
Income
How they interact with your brand?
Other info depending on your business

Understanding who you are trying to reach and interact, greatly helps you to put yourself in their shoes and thus ensures that you are successfully managing your relationships with them.

Solve any problems quickly and professionally

Apologizing to your audience concerning the sudden bug or server failure which affected your website or service, can save you tons of negative attack and complaints, right?
By explaining what the problem is and expressing concern on your part, some people will see that notifying you of the problem in a negative way is not necessary.

There’s no single formula that will represent your perfect apology for any problems, however always try to be transparent and consistent; and really put some hard work to fix this problem from your part.

Tell customers how they can reach you

Some customers visit your social networks accounts only trying to to find another way to communicate with you. With this growing use of social networks as a platform to help customers in this context, only 30% of customers prefer to solve their problems through social networks rather than other ways of communication. Although this percentage is increasing, it is important to give your customers many other ways to communicate with you.

Respond to customer inquiries in a timely manner

Quick response shows how committed you are to customer service and problem solving, builds a positive image and increase their trust in your brand.

You can increase your chances of quickly responding to customers by placing a feature that sends you alerts on your phone continuously.

You can also use pre-existing answers in the FAQ list and communicate a customized respons to each customer when on need.

Available advanced social media monitoring tools like Lucidya can greatly help you collecting information and learning more about your customers and users on different social networks. Those tools play a vital role in gathering relevant statistics about your brand’s reach and also help you in monitoring your key performance indicators for various channels and campaigns.

You may need to mainly focus on:

Your brand name/trademark
Your competitors’ trademarks
Names of the products and services you provide
Other keywords of your industry.

Through these statistics and information, you will be able to identify challenges and have the right awareness to face them.

Define How you’ll interact with Audience

You’ll need to define how you’ll talk with your fans, non-fans, clients, partners, prospects and even competitors. Setting standards or rules that represents the nature and brand of your company consistently will greatly help in your online presence journey. Usually, you’ll have to define the following:

Your Tone of Voice
Agree on specific responses in some situations
Customize these responses to suit users

Humanizing your conversations

Try as much as possible to avoid one pattern of static responses, and humanize your conversations with customers. The more you can achieve this point, the more people will trust your talk and services. Mastering this part will reflect in a clear growth and improvement in your level of customer service; always remember that one size does not fit all.

Reward Active Customers

Social Customer Relationship management is not only about problem solving and complaints, but it also enables you to strengthen that relationship when showing them appreciation and their loyalty to your brand.

Small businesses can constantly track the most interacting of their fans with some discounts or free trials, etc.. Large businesses can use e.g. contests to encourage interaction, etc..

Creating and publishing content created and written by users “User-Generated Content” will greatly strengthen your relationship with them.

Sharing their content, story, or life, is always a sign that you really consider them part of your brand existence and this will definitely boost their loyalty.

CRM Bottom line: Convert negative experiences to positive ones, and convert positive experiences into ambassadors.

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