At first, one may believe that Customer Service and Customer Relations are synonymous. However, there is a very distinct difference between the two. Customer Service is more of an inbound function which a customer expects before or after making a product purchase. On the other hand, Customer Relations is both an inbound and outbound activity.
It considers your organization’s ability to react to present issues as well as your approach to bettering future experiences. Customer relations focuses on the proactive steps you’re taking to engage customers and improve the customer experience.
Customer relations encompasses all of the important functions that customer service performs, but also includes the efforts made before and after customer interactions. While responding to immediate customer needs is a great way to provide excellent customer service, searching for solutions to future roadblocks is how your company can build positive customer relations.
Social Media and Customer Relations
In the last few years, social media has become one of the most effective tools for communication with customers. Platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram allow companies to reach out to current and prospective clients, as well as establish brand identity.
There are other channels beyond social media that a company uses for client communication. Channels like emails, newsletters, phone calls, and chats can also help a business keep up with their customers. One thing that a business needs to remember is that the communication should not become fragmented in all these channels. There has to be one story that needs to be followed and communicated.
Frictionless customer experience makes sure to delight and retain the customers. How can one ensure that the interactions between customers and a business are always seamless? One of the ways we learned recently was to write a brand story.
What is a brand story?
A brand story is the core essence of a brand, expressed through simple brand narratives and design, that evokes emotional reactions in the target customers and helps them to connect to the brand.
Social Media and CRM Integrations
After a brand story, a business can consolidate all their data with the help of Software as a Service (SaaS). Let us elaborate on how you can integrate all your social media platforms with SaaS apps.
Your CRM is where most of your customer and lead data lives, so for a lot of businesses, it’s the single most important application when it comes to tracking interactions, storing your customer data, and analyzing it all in one place. It’s also an important hub where all your staff can go to find everything they need to know about your contacts.
But a CRM can also be an extremely convenient tool for businesses to manage their presence on social media. A lot of companies can find social media a bit overwhelming, especially when they’re just starting out. There are a lot of profiles to keep on top of, direct messages and public posts to reply to, and strategies to keep your audience engaged, just to name a few.
The good news is that most top CRMs on the market today support social media integrations. What you can do with these integrations will mainly depend on the tool you’re using, but here are some of the most common features:
- Schedule SoMe posts and form queues ahead of time
- Track reactions, replies, and followers
- Keep updating your social media profiles
- Quickly respond to messages and texts on SoMe platforms
- Automatically add a new contact in the CRM whenever a message is received on any of the platform from a new lead
- Keep the prospects’ progress in the sales funnel and regularly track it
HubSpot – one of the growing SaaS applications for customer management:
One of the most popular Customer Relationship Management Tools in today’s time is HubSpot. The customer management tool offers social media capabilities that come with the Marketing Hub. The features on the platform includes publishing social media posts and building paid ad campaigns, and also posting new blog content. Not only that one schedule posts, monitor social mentions, and build comprehensive reports with data.
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