Minding the digital storefront

Let’s set the scene:

You’re the owner of a hair salon. Business is good but you’re aiming for spectacular. You walk into your salon on a Tuesday to the phone ringing and none of your employees making any attempts to answer it. The next day you return to the same scenario. It’s now Wednesday. There are customers in various stages of being groomed. The phone is ringing and no one in answering. It could be anyone on the other side of that phone line: a new customer, someone who saw your ad on Facebook, a customer trying to reschedule an appointment for next Wednesday, someone from the city about your business license, or a vendor with a lead on a great new product. Thursday, you enter your salon to the same issue. Maybe this time it’s a stylist who’s new to the area looking for a booth in a hot and happening salon, and they want to know if that’s your salon.

How would you react to your employees not answering your phone?

How much business would you estimate you lose every time your ringing phone is not answered?

Now let’s flip this scenario to your business’s social media page. Every message sent to your social media page is a ringing phone. Every message left unanswered on your business social media page is a phone left unanswered.

True story:

Ninety-eight percent of my social media clients hired me to create their social media pages and profiles from scratch. But recently I took over the maintenance of a client’s existing Facebook business page. After gaining role access to the page, I logged in to survey the landscape, so to speak. The first thing I noticed was that my client failed to respond to messages sent by potential and current customers.

There were unanswered questions from March 2018, January 2018, and even further back to December 2017 that my client never answered.

Questions like:

Can I book an appointment?

Do you have a new number?

Are you open on 12/26?

Each of these questions indicated that the customers had a problem they needed my client to solve. Problems that were well within the purview of my client’s services. Problems that according to these unanswered questions, my client never solved.

These unanswered questions while initiated online represent the same loss of business that an unanswered phone line represents. They directly contribute to a loss of booked appointments, client referrals &recommendations, and overall business revenue.

From brick and mortar to digital storefronts

As we in the business world transition to a social media landscape, where customers no longer call our business landlines but instead message our business on Facebook and other social media sites, we have to take our same customer service model from our brick and mortar storefront to our digital storefront.

In the same way that you would not ignore a ringing phone at your store, do not ignore the digital ringing phone on your social media platforms.

If it’s your business practice to respond to customers within 24 hours of their call to your business when they leave a message, observe the same 24-hour policy when responding to your online customer messages.

I won’t get into the nuts and bolts of whether businesses should respond quicker on social media than on traditional landlines. Nor will I tackle the perception that “online” means always available. (Let's save those for another day.) However, I will say that there are several ways to handle messaging to your customers when you are unavailable during non-business hours. Auto messages help customers feel as if they are being addressed even when you are unavailable. It is a measure of instant gratification that will tide your typical customers over until someone from your business can get back to them.

Another way to placate customers during your periods of unavailability is to indicate your average response time. The Facebook options range from typically responds in minutes, within an hour, in a few hours, to in a day. Manually choose the time that best reflects your business’s response time practice. That way even if it’s typically responds in a day, when it takes a day for you to respond, your customers are not surprised, which helps temper disappointment.

I would be remiss if I did not point out that you do run the risk of that customer clicking out of your page and trying to find the next business in the search results. This is always a risk.

In the world of social media, if you don’t respond, there are plenty of other Facebook businesses to reach out to online. Customers have more options for moving on to the next, now more than ever. They are as loyal as their options. So, failing to respond is costing you a lot of business. With the click of the back button, customers are leaving your page and clicking the next match in the search. Increase your business success odds by at least responding to their messages in a timely manner.

Search results are everything on social media

And speaking of search results, another important reason you should respond in a very timely manner to your social media messages is to improve your site’s SEO and search results rating. The more customers to click your page and receive a response, the higher your response rate. The better your response time and rate, the more trustworthy your business appears. The more trustworthy your business appears, the more people view your page as an authority or valid business. Google search engines take notice. And you want Google to take notice. We all do.

Still uncomfortable about blurring the communication lines?

If you're one of those business owners who just don't feel comfortable switching between the traditional communication model and the new digital model, encourage your customers to contact you the old way.

You can easily accomplish this by including a statement in your auto-message that says something like,

"Thank you for contacting Pretty Docs. We use this inbox to receive feedback on our website/social media platform. For better service, please contact our office at 800-888-8888."

If your business includes attorney services, you more than likely want to discourage customers from sending claims information to your social media inboxes. If so, indicate this in your auto-messages. This is perfectly fine. Just always give them an alternative communication method with specific instructions.

Including a phone number for them to call: Great.

Including a contact name and phone number for them to call: Stellar!

And lastly, if all of this is still too much landscape to cover, hire a digital media manager or marketing manager to get the job done. Just don't let the ringing phone go unanswered.

#digitalstorefront #respondingtocustomersonline #socialmediaautomessages #customersandsocialmedia #customerserviceonsocialmedia #PrettyDocs