Social messaging has become a standard for customer engagement. In fact, it’s hugely popular among consumers, especially those 45 and under. Verint’s State of Digital CX report found that half of all young consumers engage with companies via messaging channels.

And not surprisingly, organizations are increasingly meeting consumers there for its indisputable positive business impact. McKinsey reports that customers spend 20 to 40 percent more with companies that respond to customer service requests on social media. Using social media to facilitate customer service does more than build brand equity, it also provides a rich data source for collecting and actioning authentic customer feedback.

Here are several key considerations as brands build out their 2023 social media success playbooks.

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Strategy #1: Stick with Twitter

You may have noticed that there’s been some upheaval at Twitter. The impact has left many brands questioning if they should be using the likes of Twitter for social customer service moving forward. With the primary concern being: Are my customers still there, on the platform?

Twitter’s spike in the news may have caused an exodus of advertisers, but it’s a blip on the radar from a customer engagement perspective. At Verint, we can analyze social media channel usage among our customer base, which consists of 85 percent of Fortune 100 customers and thousands of brands worldwide. Through our own analysis, we have not seen any noticeable reduction in the volume of customer conversations on Twitter. It remains the most widely adopted social media channel among our customers, who report that they continue to see value in both the public and private services.

While the vast majority of Twitter’s revenue comes from advertising, it generates about $570 million from data licensing from brands using the platform for messaging for customer service and promotion. And increasingly, Twitter direct messaging is being used by brands to communicate on a one-to-one asynchronous messaging basis – offering customers an always-on, convenient and personalized customer service channel, along the lines of how they communicate with friends and family.

We advise brands to stick with Twitter because their customers are still very active on the platform. If anything, the recent events are a shakeup of a public platform about to become more fiercely public – even more reason to stay, given Twitter’s unique differentiator in the public domain.

Net-net, Twitter is here to stay – especially for customer engagement. Even though its daily active user base is much smaller than WhatsApp or Instagram, for instance, the truly public nature of Twitter’s platform helps it to stand out as a place for convenient and immediate connection with consumers.

Strategy #2: Diversify Social Messaging Channels

It’s always a good idea for brands to evaluate their social media strategies to ensure alignment. Now may also be a good time to diversify your social media presence by considering new social and private messaging platforms for customer engagement. For example, although WhatsApp doesn’t have Twitter’s visible accessibility, it does have more than 2 billion active users worldwide and can be automated at scale.

The key to successful digital interactions isn’t necessarily being on every channel available, it’s understanding which ones your customers use and engaging them there. Then by plugging into solutions which monitor traffic and usage and allow companies to connect a customer’s journey across multiple touchpoints, personalized customer experiences become possible.

While choosing a channel is often dictated by customer preference, there are different features that should also be considered:

• WhatsApp and Apple Business Chat offer secure encryption of messaging, giving consumers peace of mind when sharing personal information.
• Integrated shopping experiences are possible with Facebook Messenger and Instagram Messages; they can enable whole retail journeys from customer acquisition to order tracking – all within a single messaging conversation.
• If companies want universal reach, two-way conversations via SMS, which is an ‘opt out’ channel, enables brands to reach 100 percent of a mobile audience with ease.

There are plenty of alternative solutions that provide accessible, immediate, and personalized communication via digital channels. It’s just about finding the right partner to fulfil your customer engagement needs.

Strategy #3: Combine Bots with Human Agents to Boost Social Messaging Performance

Messaging channels perform at their best and yield optimal experience and return on investment when organizations consider colocation of bots and human agents within the channel, but this is just the start of smart messaging strategy.

Here are four best practices:

1. Bidirectional Hand Offs – The art of customer service messaging requires a platform that can synch the merits of both humans and bots. A platform that can seamlessly hand off customer interactions from bot to agent and back again is critical.
2. Human-Bot Collaboration and Training – Bots and human agents co-existing on a channel has enormous benefits, but doing it right is the differentiating factor. When a bot hands off information to an agent, that agent needs to be able to see the conversational history – i.e., what did the bot do or not do in the circumstance? Why did the conversation get handed off to the agent? The customer expects the agent to already know what they told the bot. Everyone in the business must receive base-level training and understanding of what precisely a bot can and cannot do on messaging channels.
3. Eliciting Context – Messaging is wildly visual. An agent needs to know that a customer “hearted” their message so they can “heart” it back. Having a sense of what things look like from the customer’s experience is essential. This means being able to see image attachments and emojis. When you strip those things away, the agent is missing an important part of the conversation. Companies must understand and adopt the unique features that each channel offers.
4. Measuring “Apples to Apples” – With messaging, performance measurement requires metrics tied to the specific way each channel works. Comparing messaging versus live chat performance is like comparing apples to oranges. You can’t treat one like the other, or you will get misguided insights and data. The key is the ability to have software and insights that accurately capture the nuances of interactions on messaging to allow you to compare and contrast with your other channels.

Strategy #4: Be Everywhere Your Customers Are

Our research shows that messaging channel engagement is associated with an 89 percent customer retention rate. This should put social and private messaging platforms at the forefront of customer engagement. While also keeping in mind that there are plenty of “fish in the sea” to build your social customer engagement stack. Ultimately, the most important factor to consider when developing your social media strategy is to make your business available on your customer’s channel of choice to deliver optimal customer experience.

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