Social Media is a powerful tool for businesses as it gets them in direct touch with their target audience and, more importantly, their customers. This customer touchpoint that social media provides is already an integral part of customer experiences and businesses who leverage this aspect of social media will be able to cater better to their customers.
According to data released by Sprout Social, 55% of adults said that they first heard of brands via social media and 78% said that a positive experience with a company via social would be enough to get them to make a purchase. These numbers highlight the growing importance of social media in customer experience. But what exactly does customer experience mean? Let’s look into it below and understand how brands can create a customer experience strategy with social media at its heart.
What is Customer Experience?
Customer experience or CX is the customers holistic perception of their experience of interacting with your business and brand while browsing your website, communicating with your customer service department and receiving the product or service they purchased. This holistic perception is what determines whether your customer will come back or not. In recent years, social media has been added to the mix of CX as more and more customers reach out to the brand on social media for queries and insights. This makes it even more important for brands not only to be active on social media, but to also be responsive to their customers.
Especially when it comes to online businesses, social media is one of the most important channels as it keeps your customers informed of new developments and provides a platform for customers to share their valuable feedback.
But despite the impact of social media on CX, many companies have not taken steps to integrate it into their CX programs. According to data released by Hootsuite, 82% of companies agree that social is a vital channel for delivering exceptional customer experiences, but only 58% have a defined strategy for doing so. So how do you craft a CX strategy that has social media at its heart? Let’s look into it below.
Creating a Social Media-Focused CX Strategy
For brands wanting to create a social media-focused CX strategy, it is important for them to look at CX as a collection of experiences across various touchpoints leading to seamless and consistent experiences across multiple channels. According to data from SaaS provider Freshworks, 26% of consumers prefer being able to continue conversations across different platforms without needing to repeat themselves. This highlights the need for customer experience to be as frictionless as possible.
In order to achieve this, brands need to select the right social media platform that fits their CX strategy best. This can be determined by diving into company objectives and target audience profiles. Additionally, the CX strategy should also consider search engines, blogs, websites and ecommerce platforms and make sure there is synergy between all the platforms.
Another thing brands need to remember while creating a social centred CX strategy is to ensure that customers are at the centre of all their decisions. This can be done by understanding the pain points and needs of the customer and figuring out how you can work towards making the experience better for them. Brands also need to create a strategy that focuses not only on sharing content, but also on listening to what their target audience is saying.
Building a strategy that engages with customers and makes room for collecting feedback is essential in order to improve customer experience for the brand.
