In fact, it can wind up being your most important customer service platform, depending on the age of your target customers. Millennials prefer to contact a business through social media — 26% of customers ages 18 to 34 use social media to contact a company. More importantly, are you responding? Only 9% of people use chatbots to contact a business, but this number is only growing. Chatbots can be extremely flexible — they can respond with a consistent message each time, or they can provide different responses based on certain keywords within the messages. Chatbots are available 24/7/365. Chatbots provide nearly instantaneous responses to simple questions, providing easy communication between your business and your customers. However, chatbots can fall short in some areas, including friendliness, empathy, and the ability to provide more complex answers. Just 16% of people prefer to contact businesses through a phone call, which declines every year. Statistics show that 21% of people prefer to use social media to engage with a business.
Businesses can receive feedback in a number of ways, and social media is a favorite venue for customers to share their experiences:
- On Facebook, a customer can either recommend or not recommend your business by leaving a review.
- On Twitter, a customer can use your company’s “handle” to describe an experience (and possibly associate your business with a hashtag).
- On Yelp or Google, customers can use the traditional “star rating” system to rate your business and provide a narrative to give context to the rating.
Social media is no longer just for promotion. In fact, it can wind up being your most important customer service platform, depending on the age of your target customers.
Millennials prefer to contact a business through social media — 26% of customers ages 18 to 34 use social media to contact a company. This means it is increasingly important for businesses to monitor their social channels more diligently than ever, especially as millennials gain more purchasing power.
And the added bonus of social media “anonymity” increases the likelihood that your customers will use those channels to speak out, possibly in unflattering of ways toward your business.
People are talking about your company on social. Are you listening? More importantly, are you responding?
And most importantly, how quickly are you responding?
In today’s world, people expect immediate results. The majority of social media users expect responses in less than 24 hours, with a growing number expecting a response in an hour or less.
Social media response times can mean the difference between a satisfying customer experience and a disgruntled customer who is willing to shout from the proverbial rooftops about how terribly your business treated him or her.
That is where chatbots can be extremely important to improving your response time. Only 9% of people use chatbots to contact a business, but this number is only growing.
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