How to Conduct Customer Service on Facebook

Allison Seifert

Facebook is not just for relating with friends and family – companies that operate in the B2C services sector including hotels and restaurants need to invest in the social network as part of a long-term strategy to have a feedback platform that relates with customers as well. But too many businesses are not using Facebook for customer service effectively – if at all.

Entrepreneur writer Mikal E. Belicove recently reported on a study by STELLAService that discovered that only seven out of twenty companies in its analysis answered customer-service questions on Facebook within forty-eight hours. As Brian Person rightly observes at SocialFresh:

Whenever I come across a Facebook brand Page with dozens of unanswered fan questions on the wall, I cringe. It’s the digital equivalent of walking into a retail store and not finding a single employee to help you return a previous purchase or to tell you more about a product you’re thinking of buying.

The effect of an underutilized Facebook page is even worse than that. With more and more people using mobile devices, all it takes is a few seconds for a dissatisfied customer to post something negative on Facebook (or on Twitter, Yelp, or elsewhere) that will be seen by an untold number of people. I was once in an Apple store because I was having issues with my iPhone, and the representative told that the devices do not work well with Gmail. I posted my problem on Facebook and received twenty eight posts in five minutes – two of which did solve the problem. Did Apple’s customer support come out looking good or bad?

Now, multiply my single experience by the millions of people who have tens of millions of interactions with various businesses each day. The possibility for any business to appear good or bad is enormous since social media is quickly becoming the desired point of contact between companies and consumers.

Forrester Research (via Stacey Politi in Mashable) noted that 27% of U.S. online consumers looked for customer-service support on the Internet last year and that 75% expect replies to negative comments posted on companies’ Facebook walls.

What the data reveals is that nearly all of people complaining on corporate Facebook walls are not so-called “trolls” – those who are entertained by posting inflammatory or provocative statements in various online forums. Instead, they are genuine individuals who want their real problems to be addressed. As we spend more and more time online, it is becoming easier and more preferable to send a quick note to a company’s Facebook page or Twitter account rather than wade through an extensive website or wait on hold on the telephone for an hour.

Companies ignore these inquires at their own digital peril, and too many firms are doing exactly that. For example, businesses can – and many do – delete any negative comments on their Facebook pages, but that often only results in enraged customers who will post again and again – reaching untold numbers of your fans – until they receive a response (or is banned from the page). Think about how that reflects on your business.

There are best practices for Facebook customer support, but before we go into the specific details, you first need to know the general challenges (as accurately described by Person):

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