Community Question: Customer Care Challenges

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.