Community Question: Customer Care Challenges

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.

I think the biggest obstacle for providing good customer care is truly understanding your audience and not over simplifying them. Within broad demographics there are countless sub-groups, and as Gen-Z and Alpha continue to grow up, they want content/services that cater more specifically to them. Tools such as those found on Sprout can be helpful in reaching these niche audiences. 

Time and an SOP that will allow the Social Team monitoring the different platforms to bring resolution in a timely fashion. People have the expectation of a quick resolve to their problem, otherwise they leave you, or worse, start trashing your company/service/product. 
We have created a database as part of our SOP, that includes those questions that at some point were hard to resolve and what steps can be taken in order to provide a resolution to the customer. This avoids having to go to other teams each time for an answer. Also, as part of the SOP we are starting to add “actions” that the team can take, in order to provide a positive experience (ex: discount codes, free swag, etc) and not lose the customer.
 

I believe the most significant challenge is a lack of resources provided to social media managers to properly manage customer care in the moment on social media. Customers want ease and social media provides them with an easy place to seek customer service, however social media teams often need to point them somewhere else for that care which adds more friction to the process for the customer.

I see the unfiltered nature of social media to be the biggest challenge that businesses face with customer care on social media. The information can come from any source, at any time, and with any message. Even with system structures and AI filtering, understanding the intent, needs, and authenticity of a social message or post can take more time and energy than people realize (especially for a one person team).

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