Facebook Chat Gets Less Confusing
You use Facebook to talk to customers and clients. It’s an easy way to answer questions, provide support, gather feedback and generally promote your brand. Not only do you comment on posts and engage them in public, but you allow them to send you chat messages when they have more in-depth issues or simply need to check on the status of a project. People do not like to sit on hold after calling a support hotline, but they don’t necessarily mind having the chat window open as they complete other tasks on the phone or the computer. It’s perfect in a lot of ways, except one: It can get confusing.
Miscommunication can kill a conversation and a sale. A customer asks a string of questions, for instance, and then gets confused when your support team gets to the message and the customer doesn’t know which question they’re answering first. Or, you have multiple people in the chat at the same time, and there is confusion about who is responding to whom and which person is the intended recipient of the reply. Customers get frustrated, they give up, they close the window and there’s nothing you can do.
Adding Quotes
Facebook knows about this problem, and they’ve just made a big change to the chat system that can help eliminate such confusion and miscommunication. From here on out, you will be able to quote people as you reply to them.
It’s not hard to do. You just hold down on the exact message you plan to reply to, and the chat program quotes it for you. You then type your reply under it, and both messages show up together.
It’s a simple change, but it can make a massive difference. Now you can quote each individual question as you answer it, helping clarify things when you can’t respond instantly to the message. Or, if you have multiple people talking at once, you can quote each person individually and respond in turn.
Your Social Media Presence
Remember, using social media to connect with customers still means putting the customer first. It’s a tool to help you work with them and assist them. Any change that helps you do this, no matter how small, can also help your brand, your reputation, your conversions and the effectiveness of your support staff.
You need to keep these fundamental goals in mind with all of your social media marketing, and you need to stay up to date on any future changes so that you can implement them when they can help your business thrive in the modern online marketplace.
