Customer Care Tip

I have had a little bit of an issue with automatic responses.. often times a person will come to our FAcebook page with an issue and the auto replies are all perky and happy.. thank you for your message yadda yadda.. and then if you don’t see the message in a timely manner that is sitting there and they get angry because they think they are going to get a reply from a person.. so I am definitely on the fence on auto replies.

A step beyond the platform automations are tools like Sprout’s chatbot feature! They’ve saved me in the past.

I’m with you, ​@ohva.comms! When I first started this role, Louisiana experienced a hurricane and some of our bank branches closed for a day or two. People would message the Facebook page asking if a branch was open, and the automatic response would trigger “Hi, thanks for contacting us. We’ve received your message and appreciate you reaching out.” The message didn’t even say that we would do anything to help them out! And since it was replied to, I wouldn’t even get a notification that I had an unread message in my inbox. I quickly disabled those automatic messages after that and have been personalizing responses ever since.

I understand what you’re experiencing though ​@emily.murray. It’s hard to keep up with everything when you’re by yourself (I am too!). And automation definitely helps take some of the fear of missing messages away. If you find that they help you, keep using them but make sure you’re not automating so much that your brand misses the benefits that can come with personalization. And remember to keep checking your messages just in case an automated reply makes you miss a new one that came through. And always take care of yourself since you’re doing it alone and it's easy to get overwhelmed!

​@Chris-Anderson I was wondering why I wasn’t getting notifications! I hadn’t thought that auto reply was related to that. Thanks so much for that tip.

​@ohva.comms That’s a great perspective! We start off with saying that we’ve pinged a team member so that the person knows that one of our team members will reach out soon. I’m hoping that starting off this way will help with any angry responses 😅

​@rebecca.taylor I had no idea Sprout had a chatbot feature! I’ll definitely be looking into it. Thanks for letting me know!! 😊

​@Chris-Anderson That’s a great point! Luckily for our brand we haven’t seen any negative responses to our automatic reply yet. I will definitely be taking your advice with double checking messages in case we miss any and also keeping an eye out for any negative responses to our automatic reply 😊