Five ways social media can boost your customer experience

Customer experience is and remains to be the key differentiator for an established business front. Whether real life or virtual, the deal is sealed with the quality of experience you partake in or are able to provide. As we re-route our life’s course towards the digital realm, it serves to know how to use social media to enable a great customer experience.

Here are five ways in which you can harness the power of social media to boost customer experience.

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Enables active engagement with users

If you own virtual real estate, it's imperative to ensure it attains its complete potential. Social media not only makes interactions with your customers easy and effective, it provides an opportunity to make your presence felt. So each time you respond to queries on your social media handle, your consumers feel acknowledged. Hence giving the brand a personality of its own.

It's also advisable to that hire a professional, as errors such as - comments that read as rants or, worse, are grammatically incorrect - can do as much damage to your reputation as an unsavory scandal.

Allows rewarding consistent fans/followers

Free gifts need not be relegated to damage control alone. Boosting organic likes on your page requires the employment of effective vigil; you must be aware as much of the brand's trumpeters as its pall bearers.

When you send a freebie to an unsuspecting fan - for their approval or their critique, you mark your seriousness over your digital image and provide a source of fan engagement. These small gestures go a long way in establishing your image as a brand that puts customers experience above all else.

Helps to collect, integrate and categorise customer data

It also becomes a means to create a database, with regards to the people who access your page/handle. You can use the analytics based on the age group, thought-patterns, personal behaviour, consumer behaviour and political/economic/religious preferences – and establish reasons that determine their usage patterns.

When you stack up the collected data, patterns will emerge. Understanding the trend will help you aim your posts, rewards, advertisements, etc.

Use it as a problem-solving platform

Sure you are bound to get activity on your handle with clever status messages, cool viral videos and addictive GIF animation. Well initially at least. Eventually, all faff and no fix can make a brand appear cold, irresponsible and unreliable. Along with easy laughs and thoughtful quotes, ensure that you appear willing (and capable) to solve problems. Whether it’s apologising to an angry customer to sending over service managers to crisis sites, your response will put you in the league of brands that walk the talk and act on the ‘KEY’ words.

Employ customer feedback to work for you

There's no better brand than the one that places itself in the hands of its customers. This is best reflected by brands which not only encourage but seek inspiration from honest and real customer feedback.

Brands that regard customer feedback as a sign of their goodwill go beyond the usual 'we are sorry' or 'we sincerely regret' comments. Instead, they engage the users on a personal level, in a bid to understand the cause of their grievance and work towards dealing with it effectively. If you are honest in your dealings and effective in your solution, rest assured, the customer will himself or herself shed light on your good behaviour on social media.

The world is bustling with options; brands live and die by the minute, loyalties fade and intensify overnight. You don't need to be Sherlock Holmes to identify what the current situation entails for the world of business and entrepreneurship. It will always serve your brands best interest to harness your social media potential to the fullest.