Social Media Customer Services Tools
For any eCommerce business one of the key concerns with social media is to make sure you’re responding to any customer queries. A Facebook Page of complaining customers who aren’t being responded to is not great for anyone!
But managing customer queries on social media isn’t easy:
- you and the customer have limitations on what can be said – just 140 characters on twitter, and also only what can be shared publicly.
- it’s often hard to find the customer service queries, they come in from all different angles and can quickly get lost if there are lots of messages
- once you’ve identified the messages you need to respond to it can be timeconsuming keeping track of who in your team’s responded to what – and making sure everything’s been responded to
To solve these problems – you need a good social media customer service tool.
To help one of indiumonline‘s clients I’ve just been looking into what options are out there, so I thought I’d share what I’ve found here. First off, most haven’t yet integrated with Google+ – so this advice is focused on Twitter and Facebook.
A lot of the tools you’d use to manage social media marketing activity (Hootsuite, tweetdeck etc) can be used to keep track of mentions and search out people talking about you. But if you’ve got a few people looking after customer services, or a lot of messages to deal with then you’re quickly going to outgrow these. I’ve found 3 customer services tools that are worth looking at:
A much more powerful version of tweetdeck or Hootsuite. You can set up searches to monitor specific keywords, monitor inbox and mentions as well as page posts. It will record whether a message has been replied to, or not, and also who replied (if different team members have their own tool login). As they say, “Full conversation, task and team reply history to efficiently manage messages and delight your audience.”
From $9 per user. 30 day free trial.
Will cope with all social media profile, not just twitter.
This is full-on customer service management tool – not just one for social media. Tweets etc can be turned into tickets and very comprehensively managed – each ticket even gets it’s own webpage, so you can go beyond character restrictions.
Will integrate with Hootsuite and facebook and wordpress, and lots of other tools including shopping carts, email systems and more (the list just keeps growing).
Starter Package includes 3 agents for $20 / year. Other plans from $24 / agent / month
30 day free trial available.
This used to be Assitly, but has been bought by Salesforce and integrated with their systems. So if you’re using Salesforce already – this would be the first one to try. It has much of the same functionality as Zendesk (which also integrates with Salesforce).
14 Day free trial available.
1st Agent is free. Then it’s $49 / agent / month for the rest.
I hope that’s a useful run down – if you’ve experience of these, or other customer service social media tools – then please add a comment below. I’d love to know what you think.