I think the most significant challenge in providing quick and effective customer care is the lack of timely interdepartmental communication when it comes to questions asked on socials. For example, if we were to receive a message about an event happening, as the social media manager, I may not know the answer to give them off the top of my head. This could take a couple of days to get a response from our events team, resulting in a late response. A solution we have implemented that I’d recommend to other teams is to start a group chat (on Teams, Slack, or whatever your organization uses) for social media support where you can send questions and receive a response in a timely manner.

I believe the most significant challenges faced by businesses when it comes to providing effective customer care on social media is managing the speed and volume of interactions/comments/messages. Social platforms have become essential for customer support. However, it can quickly become overwhelming for businesses due to the sheer number of inquiries they receive and the expectation for quick responses from a real person as opposed to a bot. 

I think one of the biggest obstacles is just the lack of recognition that social media ‘counts’ as customer service/care. Engaging with customers/audience through comments and DMs doesn’t get the same respect or regard that dealing with customers through email/phone/in-person often does. 

In order to change that, there are a few things we can do. The first is to be more vocal about the importance of social media engagement as a form of customer care. Sharing articles and research about it is a good step.

Second, you can make sure that others are aware of the types of questions/concerns/comments you’re getting and at what frequency. This helps with awareness.

Finally, you can loop in the customer care teams who work in other areas so that they understand you’re part of their work. Send the questions their way, keep them looped into conversations, and share feedback.

For us, the biggest challenge is that we can’t verify someone’s identity on social media, and therefore can’t help them with their question. They need to call in and verify with the last 4 of their social in order for us to share their account-related information and provide personalized assistance. 

Having the right amount of people on you team to keep up with the requests, the inquires, orders. Also, there is less personalization when everything is done on social media. It is not like you are picking up the phone and speaking with the person and guiding them into additional options and opportunities for you to make more sales of your product or services.

Collaborating departments not, well, collaborating effectively will tank an SMM’s ability to provide quality social care. When social media is looked at as someone simply ‘playing on insert platform here] all day” as opposed to a way to listen, engage, nurture, and market proactively, social care efforts are stunted unnecessarily. One thing brands can do is begin to look at social media as the important marketing element it is and use the insights gleaned there to inform their other marketing tactics.

What do you believe is the most significant challenge faced by businesses in providing effective customer care on social media, and how do you think they can overcome it?

I see the most significant challenge for effective customer cases on social media from a lack of dedicated support. In the various social roles I’ve had at very differing organizations, there is always some expectation for social media people to also be customer support experts, with an obvious disconnect to the true customer support lines. 

And with that, the reality is that people will always go to social media as a support outlet, whether a business is directly supporting that or not. It’s a public space to communicate with brands, and people will do what they can to be heard when they need something.

The business I support currently is a technology startup, for a coding/developer-related, enterprise software solution. Needless to say, when some of our product users come to me for help to debug their code on social media, I know that I am not the subject matter expert. I Google and I find user docs and tutorials within our own websites and YouTube channels where I can, which thankfully fills in the majority of it. However, sometimes what a user needs is not something I can support, so I need to escalate to our product and engineering folks. I am told constantly that I should tell users that they should stop going to social media for these questions and to send people to our GitHub and other places. Which, of course I do. But it comes back to what was said previously -- People are going to come to these channels, no matter what. So instead of businesses saying support shouldn’t be on social media, they need to acknowledge that it is there, and so a support resource needs to be integrated into the flow somehow. 

The most significant challenge, I believe, is lack of communication and collaboration between the social media and customer service teams therefore the social media team who responds to customer questions/inquiries/etc. may not have the effective methods to help customers but merely pass them off to another department.

Being a team of 2 across 2 venues, one of our biggest struggles is handling customer care on social media. It's crazy how popular these platforms have become for customers to get in touch with companies, whether they need help, want to express concerns, or just give feedback. The non-stop stream of interactions can be overwhelming and sometimes lead to delayed responses or even subpar customer support.

To help manage this we have integrated a link in our auto reply that directs to our website FAQ. This website is continuously updated when new questions arrive. This has helped our customers find the information the need without the delay of a response. While some cases the FAQ might not be applicable, its important to set realistic expectations to make it clear to customers what kind of support they can expect on social media, such as response times during business hours or limitations in handling complex issues on the platform.

PS.. Love that giveaway water bottle!

I think the biggest challenge is that the individuals managing social media are not necessarily the experts in the whatever field the organization falls under. There is often a lot of running around trying to find the right person to answer to social media users’ questions, or forwarding to Customer Service. Social media experts are often playing the role of Customer Service on social platforms but do not have the same access to customer data or the wealth of knowledge that the Customer Service team has at their disposal. There needs to be a better synergy between the Social Team and other departments to have a successful customer service experience for users on social. 

Our biggest challenge is a lot of the questions we receive via social are specific to reservations, packages or event details that our social media team does not have direct access too. We have to rely to another department to get the answers which slows down our response rates in getting back to the customer in a timely matter. Customers expect the social media manager to know the answer to absolutely everything, I wish that was the case! 

The biggest challenge I see is not enough personnel to properly run social channels and in turn not being able to keep up with customer care in a timely manner.

Authenticity - it is essential in today’s social media world for brands to be seen as trustworthy, honest, and genuine. Customers increasingly base purchasing decisions based on brand ethos. Consumer trust is like a tree; it takes a long time to grow and nurture, but can be swiftly cut down with one negative sentiment, even if that sentiment is rooted in misinformation or cognitive bias. Maintaining a sense of authenticity throughout customer communications on social media can be a major challenge. It requires a certain level of transparency. It is also important to validate the customer’s perspectives and complaints first and foremost, so you can establish a shared viewpoint, make them feel heard, and begin to grow trust.

From my perspective, understanding all of the methods that our guests contact us using and having a single view of the customer is the biggest challenge we face. We find that people that reach out on Twitter also call, email or DM us on other platforms. Salesforce can be a good solution in some organizations, but we don’t use it within ours.

I think the biggest challenge with providing customer care on social media is supporting the customer in the channel of their choice. Although cases can be solved on social, often times companies will redirect customers to their more traditional support channels from social. I think customers are choosing social because it is low effort on their part and I wish there was a way to maintain a low effort experience for them. Ideally, they should walk away from the conversation saying “that was easy!”, but with so many internal systems and security measures, it’s very difficult to verify and/or support a customer without requesting a lot of personal information, which needs to be done securely.  

I think the biggest challenge is that as the volume of the reach outs grows, it becomes too hard to make each reach out personal and catered to the person’s need/request. Of course you can use a bot, but often times for me personally, receiving an automated response doesn’t instill any sense of confidence because I know my request went to a queue with an unknown number of others and I don’t have any true idea of when my question/concern will be answered or solved.

With that being said, there is a lot of runway for companies to adjust their customer service models to better answer to those social media touchpoints since that is where more and more consumers/users are reaching out! Depending on the size of the business and the bandwidth of the customer service team, they could have a dedicated support person(s) who “personally” respond to direct reach outs, or at the very least captures the responses and delegates reach outs from the service teams. I think this could help those consumers/users who reached out on social to feel heard or seen when they receive a message from the care team to talk through their needs.

Obviously none of this is a one-size-fits-all solution, but I think more and more companies are innovating and moving in that direction! 

I think the largest challange is how social media often lives and is managed by marketing which prevents active resolutions with online customer care. A social media manager shouldn’t be responsible for customer complaint resolution nor has the resources. I see there often being a solid wall between customer care which leverages traditional communciation channels and social media where customers are using more and more for issue resolution. 

I’m echoing a lot of brilliant answers in here already but for my work, providing a consistent and timely response is the most significant challenge I face. 

As a one-person team, I am always fighting with the immediacy of social media. Customers expect quick resolutions to their questions and issues. but the volume of incoming messages and the round-the-clock nature of social media interactions can make it challenging to respond promptly while ensuring a high level of customer satisfaction, especially when I have to reach out to other departments to get answers. 

One of the biggest struggles is getting the brand and corporate teams to get involved and participate in planning and understanding the overall value that social can have on a brand. We’ve implemented quarterly meetings to go over upcoming promotions and strategies while discussing things that worked and what didn’t. We like to highlight any trends or comments that could be useful for the brand team so they can find value. 

One of the challenges is that customers don’t receive a quick enough reply via social media. A solution is to lean into the auto-reply messages you can set up to respond while you’re unavailable/not checking notifications/after hours, and assign a team member to be on-call reviewing notifications for anything urgent. 

The most significant challenge I face when managing customer care on social media is the expectation to be available to answer questions 24/7, as well as pressure to make sure each answer is 100% correct and can’t be misinterpreted in any way that could reflect poorly on the business. I work for an investment company so it’s extremely crucial to be thorough and accurate in each response, which can be difficult if a customer is expecting a quick response to a question that I’m not familiar with. This means having to contact an SME, get a response from them, edit the tone for social, and anticipate what else the customer may ask in return once we provide an answer. 

In trying to figure out how to overcome this obstacle, we created a Google doc that includes “approved social media responses” to most of our FAQs. This decreases time spent on finding answers for customers and allows me to prioritize things that may need to be urgently addressed, rather than spending time going back and forth about things we could have a pre-approved response to. 

I think the biggest challenge right now in the social space for customer service is timing with external teams. We may have a question come in that is super niche or specific to one team or person that’s unavailable at the time it comes in. What I think can help break down these barriers/wait times is keeping contact with external teams on a monthly basis to build relationships with them. It may not lead to knowing all the answers but it will at least give you an idea of how to answer on an external team’s behalf. 

Our current challenge is not being the Customer Care team. We have a separate team to work on order issues which is super helpful, but we work in silos so it can get dicey when trying to respond or DM someone and CC team does so as well. Sprout has helped with visibility but overall, would be great if we all lived on one team everyone who is touching social media. 

I would say the biggest challenge is that everyone thinks that they know what’s happening in social and tus want to provide their opion on what the SSM should focus one, when in fact a good SSM has a strategy in place that they update as needed based on trends and data.