How To Manage High Support Volumes

Managing support volume effectively is critical for response times. And with social media, your customers expect you to respond as fast as their friends and family would. To increase response time, you have to prioritize your customer contacts, so that the most critical issues are addressed first.

Highest priority: Aim to resolve these issues right away. 

• Technical or account-related questions
• Complaints from unhappy users Issues (or outages) that affect many users or raise a potential PR crisis

Second priority: These issues aren’t urgent, but they’re an opportunity to be proactive.

• Responding to general mentions of your products or services.
• Thanking those who provided positive feedback.
• Touching base with those who made comments about your brand or industry that weren’t necessarily targeted at you or required a response

Manage your customer support volume through prioritization and using technology to streamline your process. Your agents— and, more importantly, your customers — will thank you.

How successful your social customer care will depend on the quality of service you provide. Warning: you might want to pull out the kid gloves.

Agent responses must be timely, accurate, sensitive, brief, and friendly — a tall order.

First, agents have to understand their customer’s emotional state and mirror their feelings. If a customer seems happy, smiley faces or emojis might show friendliness and a willingness to help. If a customer is upset, on the other hand, a formal tone of empathy or apology might be needed.

In general, all tenets of excellent customer service apply to social media.

• Correctly identify the issue or problem.
• Provide links to additional information.
• Close the loop (even to a “thank you” comment or tweet).
• Include a personal touch, such as signing off with the agent’s first name or initials.
• Be consistent across the organization with regard to tone and response time. 

Remember the most important ingredient to customer care: the customer. Treating them with the same level of service you’d expect can go a long way to turning a frustrating situation into a great one.