Social Messaging To Enhance Customer Experience

Oct 15, 2022

Social messaging has grown in popularity over the last few years, with more people using the top apps, such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger to stay in touch with friends and family.

But social messaging has also made its way into the business world with customers being able to ask questions about products and services and receive a reply within minutes.

Other consumers use social messaging to book appointments or to get a quote from a company they’re considering doing business with.

In other words, social messaging has completely transformed the way people interact with their favourite brands or learn more about companies that they’ve previously never done business with but are considering.

With social messaging, you can talk to new customers and current ones, gain brand recognition and improve brand loyalty.

If your business has yet to integrate social messaging into your marketing strategy, now is the time to get started.

This special report covers everything you need to know about social messaging and how it can help your business grow.

The Power of Social Messaging

Social messaging is a fantastic way to create a positive and memorable customer experience.

They work on your behalf to facilitate a direct, personal and more meaningful engagement between your company and your customer base.

They also make it easy to connect with new customers, transform leads into repeat business and automate many of the usual marketing tasks associated with lead generation. As people are already using these apps regularly, it’s also convenient and conversational.

There are other benefits to integrating social messaging into your business. They make it easy to gather important feedback from your target audience, and this data can help shape future products and services.

For example, AXA, a popular insurance company makes it easy for their customers to communicate via WhatsApp whenever they need roadside assistance.

This integration happened after they had already worked WhatsApp into their customer service department and received lots of feedback from existing and new customers who indicated they wanted a faster, more personalized service.

If a potential customer can receive a faster response from a business that uses a social messaging app than one that is still using a traditional help desk to slowly manage and resolve customer support issues, it’s easy to guess who they’ll likely turn to.

To begin, think about how social messaging could work with your business, keeping in mind your existing support options and the way people currently reach you.

Even if you only begin by integrating social messaging into one key area of your customer support, it could make a tremendous difference.

Finally, social messaging apps are also powerful in another way. They create “wow” moments that can dramatically increase retention, not to mention customer loyalty.

Customers want to feel special. They also want individual, one-on-one attention. So, by using social messaging apps to deliver personal service to your audience, you can turn new customers into loyal fans.

If you think that including social messaging apps in your business will be time-consuming or demanding on your resources, think again.

You can use automation workflows, proactive messaging and chatbots to create highly engaging, memorable experiences with your customer base that leave an ever-lasting impression, but don’t require a lot of time and effort.

The Why and How

When it comes to choosing the right social messaging app for your business, you’ll want to consider the “why” and “how”.

WHY:

· Do your customers expect or require an immediate response to questions or concerns?
· Are potential customers looking for a consultation before deciding to purchase?
· Does your customer base need help using your products or services?

HOW:

· How are your customers currently communicating with their favourite brands?
· How are potential leads finding your competitors?
· How does your customer base prefer to communicate when learning about products and services? (Video consultations, live chat, chatbots, etc.)

Answering these questions will help you determine what social messaging apps to implement and how best to create a campaign that meets your customers’ communication expectations and delivers the best experiences possible.

The reality is, that people are no longer satisfied with one-way communication. They want better care, enhanced customer support and a brand to personalize the experience.

In addition, there’s a growing number of people who don’t want to take the time to call the business, and they don’t want to spend a lot of time having to send in a long email to a support desk just to get answers to their questions.

The demand for more engaging, personalized and prompt communication channels has made social messaging an integral part of your brand’s ability to effectively connect with your target audience.

Without social messaging, you’re essentially leaving an open gap in the customer experience and this is yet another important reason to know your “why” and “how”:

It will unlock insights that can help shape your brand’s future

When you understand your audience, it’s easy to build social marketing strategies that go the distance. It also makes it easier for you to effectively engage with your customer base in a way that hits home.

The data provided by social media apps makes this possible. You’ll gain access to important metrics that will help to keep your marketing and product development efforts on the right track.

Creating a Successful Social Messaging Strategy

One of the most important things you can do when implementing social messaging apps into your business is to be attentive and thoughtful when engaging with your audience.

People want to experience a deeper level of care when contacting a business. They need to feel listened to and leave satisfied that all their questions and concerns were properly addressed.

In other words, you want to make your customers feel as though they are your top priority. Here are a few ways to make sure this happens:

Show Appreciation:

Reward loyal customers with rewards, discounts and premium offers via your social messaging platform.

Showing repeat customers that you genuinely appreciate their business will turn customers into faithful brand advocates and keep them coming back for more.

Be Consistent:

Even if you use chatbots to automate a large sector of your communication channels, your marketing messages must be consistent across the board.

Don’t automate so much that you lose the human touch and always make sure that the feel, theme and tone of your messages match up.

Use Bots:

Setting up bots that auto-reply to questions or messages guarantees your audience receives a quick response.

It’s also a smooth and easy way to transfer support requests from bots to human agents as well, with the initial questions being forwarded behind the scenes.

Create Teams:

Assigning roles to team members is important when it comes to creating an effective social messaging system. Doing this will ensure customer inquiries are responded to quickly and thoroughly and that every customer’s needs are met.

You want to also make sure your teams have the right tools and information that they need to efficiently manage tasks, such as integrating data from all your customer channels into one place and making that information available to them.

Stay Up Front & Center:

Buzzfeed keeps its brand in front of the minds of its audience by sending out daily memes and gifs.

While sending out content daily may not work for your brand, you should consider the different ways you can use social messaging apps to deliver consistent, fresh content that your audience will love.

Don’t overload your customer base, though! The key is to deliver value and keep promotional-based messages to a minimum. You’re looking to gain brand recognition at this stage. The sale will follow.

Get Creative:

Whole Foods found a way to use Messenger to connect with their customers in a fun and engaging way and the new twist boosted interaction and engagement instantly.

Using Messenger, a user can simply send an emoji message, such as eggplant, to the Whole Foods bot who in return, will send recipes based on the emoji that was received.

Best of all, this appeals to a wide audience, from millennials to baby boomers, who love the simplicity of only having to send a short message or an emoji to receive recipes in exchange.

Think about how you can put your unique spin on the way you use social messaging apps to build exposure and reach a new audience.

Stay Focused on What Matters:

The point of social messaging apps is to build long-lasting relationships with new and existing customers.

The idea is to provide incredible value, easy communication options and to always keep your customer in mind. In other words, look at things from a customer’s perspective rather than as a business.

This can be tricky, especially because we’re often so trained to look at only the things directly relating to sales (the number of leads, where customers are in our funnel, conversion rates, and so on.)

Of course, all those things are important to our business, but when you shift your mindset so that you’re standing in the footsteps of your average customer, you’ll be able to find ways to strengthen connections and take your business to a whole new level.

Issues that are easily overlooked could be gaps and weaknesses in your existing communication channels that need to be addressed.

Or perhaps your customer base has started using a different app or you notice a shift in the demand for video consultations rather than text.

AIDA:

Every single day, we’re bombarded with ads and marketing messages. Headlines jump out at us on every page and channel. It can feel endless, overwhelming and eventually, exhausting.

And for businesses, it makes our job so much harder because, with marketing overload, buyer fatigue sets in.

People learn to tune marketing material out almost entirely and in turn, it takes more and more effort to capture attention, generate interest, encourage desire and finally, motivate a lead into taking action.

This is what AIDA stands for:

· Attention (or Awareness)
· Interest
· Desire
· Action

These are most often, the four steps from first learning about a brand to becoming a customer.

You first learn about a product or service (awareness), and you then gain interest in a product after learning more about it.

Next, you start to visualize how your life might improve with the product or service, and finally, because of that strong desire, you make the decision to take action and purchase that product or service.

When it comes to effectively using social messaging apps in your business, keeping AIDA in mind will help you cover all four segments of a customer’s journey.

This means you’ll want to:

· Create automated messages that increase trust and authority and use a chatbot to deliver them. This builds brand awareness.

· Design a series of auto-responses that address commonly asked questions so you can stimulate interest and desire. And finally,

· Make it easy for customers to take action (such as requesting a consultation, enrolling in a course, purchasing a product, booking an appointment and so on).

Top Social Messaging Apps

It’s time to dive into the most commonly used social media messaging apps so you can determine which one is right for your business.

WhatsApp: https://www.whatsapp.com

This app has more than 2 billion users and is the most popular messaging app in the world and for good reason.

It offers a wide variety of useful features including chatbots, video and voice chat, and businesses can send up to six different types of messages such as text, media, contact, location, interactive and message-based templates.

Because of how flexible WhatsApp is, you’ll be able to streamline all messaging with your customer base in one centralized spot.

Messenger: https://www.messenger.com

Still one of the leading social media apps, Messenger comes integrated with Facebook but allows people to use the app even if they deactivate their Facebook accounts (though deleting a Facebook account will also remove the app).

This social messaging app offers the ability to create automated replies and chatbots and includes video and group chat.

Using chatbots as well as automatic replies makes it easy for your business to address commonly asked questions and provide immediate support for those looking for more information.

Instagram Direct Messages: https://www.instagram.com

Instagram direct messaging is used by over 2 billion people, including many top brands. It’s a great way to get a feel for how social messaging apps work if you’re new to social media platforms.

You can also make video calls or offer voice chat to your customers.

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com

This platform has been growing in popularity rapidly with over 1 billion monthly active users.

The main difference with messaging on this platform is that to send a message, a user must accept your request. This might be a challenge for your brand but it also ensures that your inbox won’t be overflowing with spam.

And despite the requirement for someone to accept your message, TikTok does offer an automated response option for business accounts.

Telegram: https://telegram.org

This app grew in popularity quickly due to how easily it forms a bridge between people who message from different countries.

Telegram also allows for larger group messages, location sharing as well as the option to edit or delete messages even after they’ve been sent.

Discord: https://discord.com

Initially used mainly by gamers, Discord has now become one of the top messaging apps, used by both consumers and huge retail brands.

With Discord, you’re able to create your very own server which can be geared towards your niche market and the interests of your community.

These channels can also be public, private or view-only.

Best of all, you can even host live events on your servers, such as customer appreciation days, product launches, or Q&As.

Final Words

Social messaging apps help companies quickly connect with leads, form long-term relationships with their customer base and provide an enhanced customer experience.

It has essentially revolutionized customer service and the way that companies connect to their customer base and the best part is that social messaging is available to all business types and sizes.

From startups to big brands, companies have embraced social messaging to meet the expectations of their core audience and enhance the customer journey.

Remember, the easiest way to get started is to connect with customers on the platforms they’re already familiar with.

You want to make things easy for your audience so offering to resolve their problems when it’s most convenient for them, and on a channel they already use, is the best way forward.

Resources

Here are links to a few resources that I believe will help you:

Coaching:

https://promotelabs.com/coaching

AIDA Model Explained:

https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/AIDA.htm

Social Media Messaging Guide:

https://sproutsocial.com/insights/social-media-messaging

Social Messaging Platforms:

https://blog.hubspot.com/service/mobile-messaging-platforms

Social Media Messaging Success:

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/social-media-messaging-for-every-platform/392904/