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Sairam
5 tips to manage your Customer Service on Facebook
January 30th, 2012 
In this scenario, businesses need to be very careful and understand the rules of the game before they play it.
So we’ve have compiled this small, brief list of tips to manage your customer service on Facebook.
1. Have a Social Media Policy – If you don’t want to engage your customers on Social Media, say so. A lot of companies don’t. And that’s not wrong. If you plan to actually engage customers, then say so even louder. A Facebook framework for your company might be a very good investment of time. It will give direction to your employees and a vision as to want you want to achieve with your Facebook presence, making it easier to draft guidelines and respond to queries.
2. Show customers a human face – Encourage employees to let customers know who exactly they are dealing with at the company. This gives the company a human face with which customers find it easier to interact and at the same time, gives employees a certain kind of ownership of the problem. Customers also will see the people behind the brand they are interacting with, and encourage conversation and engagement.
3. Take part in the conversation – Don’t just broadcast scripted messages and calls for action. Take part in the conversation on your page, ask a few questions, get a few replies. Engagement is the key in Social Media. Be careful about a stagnating page too. Remember that Facebook is 24/7. Your fans are on it all the time.
4. Have a disaster management plan – On Social Media, things can go horribly wrong in a microsecond. Have a disaster mitigation plan ready. Who should address the problem, who should talk to the press, who should issue a statement, and so on. Believe us, this can be a remarkably useful tip.
5. Have a Facebook team – Depending upon the number of fans and subscribers you have, you can set up an individual or a team that caters exclusively to Facebook. This may not be necessary, as you have discovered Freshdesk anyway, and your support team can take over your presence with our Facebook integration. But when your business grows and you have thousands of customers and clients, someone dedicated to it would also certainly help.
Here’s a whitepaper on serving customers on Facebook and 5 reasons as to why you should be serving customers on Facebook in the first place.
Sairam
5 reasons you should be serving your customers on Facebook
November 14th, 2011 A lot of brands have ignored this & their reputations have suffered. This study from Conversocial for Ecoconsultacy sheds further light on the pressing need to integrate Facebook with Customer Service.
If you still need validation, we’ve compiled 5 reasons why you should be serving your customers on Facebook.
1. Your Customers are on Facebook.
Facebook has over 800 million active users and 50% of them log on every single day. It’s a basic tenet that businesses should be present where the customers are.
And since they are all on Facebook, you should be too.
2. It’s Easy to Use
For your customer, clicking through to your company’s page on Facebook and posting a query is far more easier than to send an email or to call you. Your customer is much more likely to contact you this way because he knows how the interface works, and he doesn’t have to go out of his way to reach you.
3. Can Give Real Time Customer Support.
You can serve customers in real time, unlike other platforms such as email. It’s an immediate, direct line to your customers that can facilitate instant customer service & gratification. The information that flows as a result for this interaction might be gold dust for your business. Here’s an article that shows how Wendy’s, Pizza Hut and Chick-Fil-A all had average first-time responses of 1:30 for Facebook customer posts and how that impacts customers.
4. Your Competition is doing it, and well.
Chances are, your competition is already serving its customers on Facebook, or at least getting up to doing so. Shouldn’t you be beating them to it? Even customer support intensive companies like AT & T are way ahead already, what is stopping you from joining them?
5. Everyone’s watching.
When your customer asks you something on Facebook and you post an immediate reply to it, there are a lot more people watching than you think. Your responses will let people know that you are there and that you are listening and that your brand can be trusted. Facebook generates a lot of eyeballs. This could be game breaking publicity for your product and service.
As Tony Alessandra put it, “Being on par in terms of price and quality only gets you into the game. Service wins the game.”
Now that Facebook is the easiest way for your customer to find you, isn’t it time to make your customer service simpler and easier?
BestBuy Customer Service Facebook Screenshot Courtesy crmsocialmedia.com
Sairam
Your Customers will now “like” your Support.
November 4th, 2011 Announcing the Freshdesk Facebook Feature
Now your customers will definitely “like” your customer support, if not love it, that is.
All over the world, companies are going and listening to their customers where they are – online, and reaping the benefits. MarketTools’ social media study based on a survey of enterprise customers found that 23% of companies were providing customer support on Facebook and 12% were providing customer support on Twitter. It’s time your company joined that list of progressive businesses. We are happy to announce Freshdesk’s brand new feature – customer support on Facebook.
Now your customer’s posts on your Facebook wall, comments on posts, and messages will all become tickets that agents can process and answer like an email ticket. Your replies will be posted right back on Facebook making it totally hassle free for your customers. Add this to Freshdesk’s Twitter feature, and your customer support arsenal now has the two most important weapons out there.
Unleash them today, and surprise your customers with your super fast support. It’s working great for us! Our Facebook fan page capture below.
Facebook Customer Service Image Courtesy ecoconsultancy.com
Girish
Engaging Customers through Social Media is more than setting up a Facebook page!
December 6th, 2010 In my earlier post I wrote about Airtel missing an opportunity to engage with customers during their rebranding exercise. While I was researching online for that post – I discovered another gem – this time a missed customer support opportunity.
Airtel infact has a public facebook page. To my surprise customers were pouring love and hate on the page. There were atleast 8-10 comments per day and a lot of them would qualify as customer support requests.
Here is a screenshot of a happy customer requesting a new connection
And the response from Airtel is to send an email with contact details to a traditional support desk.
Here is another screenshot showing a couple of more requests – one is a simple How-To, the other one is a real frustrated customer who is unable to reach Airtel support.
In both cases Airtel’s reply is the same – Send an email with your contact details to (what is possibly) a traditional email based helpdesk.
This smart user get’s it -
Unfortunately the Airtel support guy does’nt.
Think about it. You have setup a Facebook page and customers are coming there and they want to talk to you there. In many cases they are coming here because they were not able to reach your support through traditional means like an email or a phone call. What is the point in repeatedly asking them to send an email to you support desk?
Wouldn’t it be nice if you can take these Facebook messages and automatically feed them as tickets into your helpdesk. Would it not be even better if you can post updates as comments to these messages updating customers regarding the status of their tickets.
Our helpdesk software – Freshdesk will launch with this and lots of other cool features.
This is just one example (albeit a very powerful one) that demonstrates that customers are willing to reach out to you through different channels provided you are willing to listen.
Don’t let your customers face the same trouble. Sign up for the Freshdesk Beta today and get ready for some Social Support!
Girish
What is Social CRM?
November 30th, 2010 OK. You probably heard all the buzz around Social CRM and want to understand what this means.
Of all the definitions I found online, I liked this definition by Dr. Harish Kotadia the best
“Social CRM is the business strategy of engaging customers through Social Media with goal of building trust and brand loyalty.”
This definition, even though written at a very high level, clearly captures what businesses are trying to do with Social CRM – ie. Engage customers through Social media and whythey want to do it – to build trust and brand loyalty.
Now this may mean different things to different people.
For the Marketer - Social CRM means reaching out to customers and prospects through blogs and podcasts promoted on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn usually for outbound marketing communication – Eg. To announce new products or deals etc.
For the Product Manager - Social CRM means getting customers to suggest ideas to the product manager and getting the community to vote on the ideas to help prioritize features.
For the Customer Support Manager- Social CRM means being available to customers on the new social channels like Twitter or Facebook in addition to traditional channels such as email or phone, listening to the social conversation, participating in the social conversation and occasionally taking the social conversation offline to engage with the customer the traditional way using email or phone.
For the Sales Manager - Social CRM means being able to identify contacts or other sales people who are “friends” of a prospect on a social network and to try and leverage those social relationships to aid in closing the sale.
Social CRM opens up many new opportunities in each of these fields and it is going to be quite interesting and challenging to adopt Social CRM activities in an inclusive way without abandoning any of the traditional CRM activities.