For B2C brands, delivering social media customer service has become a necessity, as consumers have grown to expect businesses to respond to their queries and complaints through popular social channels. This expectation has also spilled over into the B2B world, so it’s often a good idea for brands that sell to other businesses to offer some level of customer care through social media.
While it’s something brands should do as good practice, companies using social media for customer service will find that it provides a lot of additional benefits beyond simply making customers happier. The most immediate benefit is that it enhances your brand reputation by demonstrating your commitment to customer care in a transparent, public channel.
The rewards of a good brand reputation cannot be overstated, it’s something that all marketers work very hard to achieve. This in itself will lead to increased customer retention and stronger word-of-mouth referrals.
Social media customer service can also cut costs by either solving customer issues with fast responses or directing them to self-serve online resources, it reduces the pressure on your customer support team. What’s more, all of the data generated by tracking and responding to customer queries and complaints on social media channels can provide valuable insights into your customer preferences, needs, pain points, and trends, which can help you improve your product and service offerings.
But getting customer service right on social media can be challenging. For a start, it’s often the case that customer service and social media are two completely separate functions within a business, so they need to be aligned and working together seamlessly. Meltwater's social listening solution, Explore, and social media management tool, Engage, are ideal for customer service as they are designed to help you identify and respond to customer comments on social media, no matter how big your organization. With the Salesforce Social Studio sunset, Meltwater integrates easily with Salesforce, so that customer queries raised on social channels can be effortlessly synced with the platform that your customer service department is likely to be using.
Below we’ve collected some real-world social media customer service examples from a wide range of different brands, to highlight the challenges they face and how they respond:
Domino’s Pizza
Domino’s Pizza is one of the world’s best-known fast-food brands, with millions of hungry customers ordering pizzas to be delivered every single day of the year. So it’s no surprise that the company’s social media channels are bombarded with questions and complaints because with an operation of that scale, it’s inevitable that a small percentage of deliveries won’t meet customer expectations.
The company clearly treats social media as an important customer service channel, with every query receiving a response that attempts to resolve the problem. Each message is responded to with a clear answer advising the customer of the best next step, whether that might be moving to a more detailed conversation in DMs, or escalating to the company’s online complaint handling system.
The customer is given the name of the rep dealing with their query, so that they can see a level of accountability, and a reference number enabling the case to be tracked accurately throughout the handling process.
Tip: Read our Domino’s Customer Story and learn how they use Meltwater to improve their social media operations.
Hyundai USA
South Korean auto brand, Hyundai, is the next customer service example on our list. The company is the third largest car manufacturer globally in terms of production volume and sells its vehicles in almost every country in the world. Cars are a big ticket item for most consumers, and will often represent the most expensive purchase people make other than their home, so it’s a topic that consumers not only research in great detail but also have very strongly held opinions about.
Customers sharing negative comments and experiences about the brand on its social media channels can have a big impact on sales because nobody wants to risk spending tens of thousands of dollars on a vehicle that has a poor reputation. So it’s easy to understand why Hyundai USA makes a point of quickly responding to queries, complaints, and even negative comments posted on social media.
In this example, the poster seems to be making a general comment about the quality of Hyundai cars, rather than raising a specific issue that he needs help with, but the brand still makes the effort to assist him and resolve the problem.
Tip: Read our Hyundai Customer Story and learn how they are using Meltwater's social listening suite to better understand what consumers are looking for when it comes to electric cars.
Western Union
As one of the world’s most widely used money transfer service providers, Western Union is relied upon by millions of people to send money to friends and family wherever they are in the world. That’s an important service, and the company’s customers depend on it to work perfectly every time.
When customers encounter difficulties with the service, they need to know they can get quick and reliable support from Western Union. The company delivers comprehensive social media customer service, responding to all queries and complaints, whether they’re concerning specific issues a customer needs help with, or more general comments about how the service works.
Tip: Read our Western Union Customer Story to learn how Meltwater helps the company truly understand not just the outputs and outcomes but also the impact of messages on social media.
Kellogg’s
Every morning, millions of people around the world start their day with Kellogg’s breakfast cereals, but sometimes customers are left a little disappointed. Maybe their cereal isn’t up to the usual high standards they expect from Kellogg’s, or maybe they’re just struggling to find their favorite product. Whatever the issue, the brand is always on top of social media customer service, making sure that customers get answers to their questions and any problems are resolved professionally.
With a brand like Kellogg’s, it’s unlikely that many of the issues raised on social channels are urgent or even particularly important in the grand scheme of things, but nevertheless, the company understands the importance of keeping its customers happy. By demonstrating a commitment to social media customer service, Kellogg’s is safeguarding its brand reputation.
Tip: Read our Kellogg’s Customer Story and learn how the company uses Meltwater for access to deeper data insights that help drive the success of their corporate affairs team and move beyond standard KPI.
Vans
Not all social media customer service examples are about responding to complaints and negativity, sometimes your brand just has a lot of fans with a lot of feedback. Vans is a sneaker company with a pretty big cult following, and those fans are always keen to let the company know how they feel about the latest designs on its social media channels.
Vans does a great job of letting its fans know that it’s listening to their ideas and feedback, and if you take a look at the brand’s social channels, you’ll see it responds promptly to any questions.
Read our Vans Customer Story and learn how Meltwater helps the sneaker company support successful event execution, connect with influencers, generate reports, and measure ROI.
Coca-Cola
Brands don’t come any bigger than Coca-Cola, and the company’s social media channels boast some of the largest audiences in the world. While that’s a great place to be for any B2C brand, it does come with its own challenges, namely the huge volume of queries and complaints posted on the company’s owned social channels every single day.
Coca-Cola rises to this challenge admirably, effectively responding to all queries across its broad range of international social media channels, showing customers that it cares about their problems and concerns. In this case, we see an example of the company effectively directing a customer to an online resource that provides further information about the problem they have encountered.
It would have been easy to simply ignore this complaint since it is not requesting immediate support, but instead, Coca-Cola shows that it’s listening to its customers and takes their concerns seriously. This is one of the reasons it’s such a powerful brand.
Tip: Read our Coca-Cola Customer Story and learn how they use Meltwater for brand tracking, structuring internal and external communications to stakeholders, and reputation management.
W Hotels
For luxury hotel brands like W London, it’s essential to maintain a reputation for impeccable service quality, since that’s at the very heart of their offer to customers. So when somebody publicly complains about the level of service they received, the brand needs to be seen to be doing everything possible to ensure the customer receives a satisfactory outcome.
As we can see in this example, W London monitors its social channels for any complaints and swiftly escalates the complaint to a private discussion in DMs. This is especially important in this situation, where the customer has a complaint relating to a personal health-related issue, which should not be discussed on a public channel.
Tip: Read our W Hotels Customer Story and learn how Meltwater helps them connect with customers on a personal level, get an insight into the guest experience, and measure ROI.
Mailchimp
Mailchimp is a popular email marketing/email marketing automation platform, used by millions of small and medium businesses around the world. As with many technology brands, the company has to handle a lot of tech-support queries through its social channels, as well as the regular complaints and queries that most B2C brands will be familiar with.
This requires an additional layer of training for the social media customer service team since they need to be able to provide customers with the most appropriate technical answers as well as being able to handle complaints and queries. The benefit to the business is that in many cases, such as in this example, the query can be answered quickly and easily, which reduces pressure on the tech support team and saves the customer time.
Tip: Read our Mailchimp Customer Story and learn how Meltwater’s social media management suite automates much of the company’s social media activities.
Air France
Safely flying your customers and their luggage around the world is not without its challenges, as any airline employee knows. Passengers can run into all kinds of difficulties which require support from the company. Booking problems, delayed flights, and, as in this example, lost luggage, are just a few of the problems that airline customer service teams have to deal with.
Air travel can be a stressful thing for a lot of people, and it’s understandable that they might want to take to social media to voice their complaints. The social media customer service team needs to provide timely help in a calm and professional manner to reassure the customer that their problem will be dealt with. In this social media customer service example, the Air France team has responded to the customer, requested further information in order to progress the case, and provided a couple of options for the customer to contact customer services directly with their details.
Tip: Read our Air France Customer Story and learn how the company uses Meltwater to monitor traditional and social channels to ensure accurate, up-to-date information, measure and report on major crises, work to mitigate any negative impacts, and identify and target influential sources writing about aviation and air travel.
Puma
Puma is a popular sportswear fashion brand, and it’s important that the company maintains a reputation for high-quality products. When a customer publicly complains about a pair of running shoes falling apart while still relatively new, there’s a risk of its reputation being tarnished, so it’s vital to respond to that customer and resolve the issue.
In this social media customer service example, we can see that Puma has not only replied to the customer privately via DM, but also publicly noted this so that other customers can see the company is responding and fixing the problem.
Tip: Read our Puma Customer Story about how they are using Meltwater to engage users in over 80 countries, track unique uses of campaign hashtags, and obtain a 24x higher than average engagement rate.
Learning from Social Media Customer Service Examples
When customers have complaints or questions about your brand on social media, it’s just good business sense to respond quickly and positively. You won’t be able to resolve every single issue all of the time, and often you’ll need to direct the customer to your conventional customer service channels, but nevertheless, showing that you are responsive and helpful to customers on social media can earn your brand a lot of goodwill.
If you’re ready to start delivering social media customer service that will make customers love your brand, Meltwater Engage is the best solution to get it right. Contact us today for a demonstration of how it can work for you.
