5 Tips for Interacting With Customers Online

If you’re reading this blog, you’ve probably got your social media content strategy figured out (If not, don’t worry, we have tips for that too!). But do you have a strategy for engaging with the comments and questions you receive online at scale?

It’s not easy to keep up with hundreds or thousands of comments, mentions, and messages. But a good strategy combined with the right tools can help your team prioritize, manage, and respond to a high volume of inquiries.

It’s hard to predict the way your content will be received and what issues may arise on social channels, so you may not be able to plan in the same way you plan out content, but we can offer some tips for determining your company’s digital engagement strategy.

1) Know Your Audience

Knowing your audience helps you decide on the tone you’ll use when you engage with them. Younger audiences may react positively to a more casual, playful tone, whereas companies with older audiences should stick to something more straightforward.

Customer experience management solutions, like social listening software, are powerful tools that enhance market research with social real-time data. This real-time data can help you determine who you are reaching currently (and who you aren’t but would like to reach) as well as guide you in fine-tuning your strategy according to changes in audience sentiment or other factors. A customer engagement platform that is backed with social listening analytics can help you enhance customer engagements by determining the emotion, sentiment, and potential talking points for each customer.

Nuvi's social listening monitoring, based on industry-leading social data analytics, provides real-time market research for social media engagement strategies. This mention card for an airline social monitor reads: Airlines should train staff on this form of implicit #bias. #womeninmedicine & MDs of color who respond to in-flight emergencies experience this all the time. Treat your unpaid in-flight medical pr...." Nuvi's social listening bubble graph shows that the post was retweeted several times.

2) Be Professional

Even if you have a younger audience who can appreciate some more casual content, it’s still important to put your best foot forward, especially when it comes to resolving social customer care issues.

Even companies who add a comedic twist to their online brand like Wendy’s are polite and professional when resolving issues on social channels. Establish your brand voice and positioning for social media customer service interactions such as avoiding participation in conversations about politics and controversial topics if they don’t relate to your business.

Nuvi Engage, the company's social media engagement strategy solution for enterprise business, helps businesses be professional by responding quickly and in a relevant manner. The Engage queues are listed to the left under the title of All Engagements, which total engagements list to the right, in this case is 16. The queues are: compliments, crisis management, espanol, high priority, and inquires. To the right of this list is several social media messages in one of these customer service queues.

3) Ask Questions

Displaying a genuine interest in your audience’s opinions and experiences will create a personal bond with customers that inspires brand loyalty. Asking questions can help you gather information about their favorite (and least favorite) aspects of your product to share with your product development team, as well as help you gather information more generally about your audiences’ wants and needs.

Getting to know your audience simply by asking for their input combined with social listening market research should inform your content strategy so your brand can provide the content they are looking for. Asking questions also enhances your social media engagement strategy as it makes you more relatable and personable. And it develops your online reputation because asking questions communicates that you genuinely care about your audience and their thoughts and concerns.

Customer Experience Management enhances customer engagement strategies by help customer services teams identify customer needs, engage with customers better, and then create new social media engagement strategies or enhance what is there. The image has Identify in a box at the top of this portrait orient picture. The box is a dark orangish gray. An arrow points down the next box which has the word Engage in it is and is a bright blue, lastly an arrow points down the a box that says create and this box is green.

4) Be Responsive

This one may seem obvious, but it’s essential to include replying to as many comments, posts, and messages as you can in your social media engagement plan. When prospective followers view your profile, they’ll feel more comfortable about reaching out to you with any questions they may have if they see you are responding to other users’ questions in a timely manner.

Being responsive includes not only response rate but speed—if you take too long to respond, potential customers may have already moved on to a competitor.

Nuvi Engage allows Enterprise Customer Service Managers set up the queues that customer engagement messages will be sent to. This on lists the Queue name to the left, which is Compliments, then the Parent Queue, which this Queue doesn't have, and then the Assigned users, which in this case is a woman named Wilma Foster. In a box to the left is a list of all the customer engagement queues, how many messages they've had in the last 24 hours and the number of assigned users per queue.

5) Have Something to Say

Although we recommend posting often enough that your followers don’t forget you, it’s not ideal to post too frequently. You may be unfollowed by some customers if they feel you post more often than others on their timelines (let alone that platforms won’t organically show your content if you post too frequently), and it’s important that your content has utility.

A content creation workflow with grey cards and workflow column boxes hovers over a pink gradient background (with full pink on the left side and nearly white on the right). Hovering over the workflow box are three social posts: one from Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. The first one depicts a woman with a mask shopping for cloths. The Instagram post shows California at sunset and the Facebook post shows some budget-friendly meals. All this is gathered from user-generated or employee-generated content.

Useful content provides valuable information, education, thought-provoking questions, or solutions to your followers. Remember, you’re there to educate the public on your product. Have fun, but keep it short and simple in order to maximize your utility and engagement.

This tip is especially important with regards to social customer care. “I’m sorry to hear that” is an all-too-common phrase on social media, and can be frustrating to customers when further action isn’t taken. Ensure that their issue is escalated to the proper team to avoid similar issues in the future and show that you value their feedback.

Looking for more assistance managing your company’s social engagement? Learn more about the new Nuvi Engage 3.0.