How to Manage an Influx of Customer Messages This Holiday Season

November 20, 2018

Anne Felicitas, editor at AdvertiseMint, Facebook advertising agency

‘Tis the season for holiday shopping, and as flustered customers scramble to buy the perfect gift for their loved ones, expect calls and messages to flood in with requests for support and general inquiries, may that be an inquiry for return policies, a request for store hours information, or a small complaint about a defective product.

The holiday season is the busiest time of the year, but don’t you let the thought of hectic calls and messages overwhelm you. I have a few tricks up my sleeve to share.

Don’t Dawdle

Don’t ignore the flood of messages the way you ignore the dishes piling up in your kitchen sink. Although it is overwhelming to see unread messages pile in your inbox, you must respond to each message as quickly as possible to deliver satisfactory customer service.

People are impatient, studies show. In an experiment that measures attention spans, Computer Science Professor Ramesh Sitaraman at UMass Amherst examined the viewing habits of 6.7 million users and found that users abandon a video after the first two seconds. As technology provides people with instant gratification (same-day shipping, quick internet speeds), users become more and more impatient. If customers can’t finish a video past two seconds, they won’t wait days for your reply.

If you communicate with customers using Messenger, Facebook recommends that you respond within a few hours. If you don’t, your untimely responses will be documented for all to see, as all Facebook pages disclose a business’ response time. If your response time isn’t up to par with customers’ expectations, your business could be viewed as unreliable and unprofessional.

Each Facebook page discloses a response rate

Of course, you’re no superhuman being. You can’t manage a flood of messages on your own. If you become overwhelmed, enlist the help of a chatbot. According to research by Gartner, organizations that use chatbots had reduced calls, chat, and email inquiries by 70 percent. They also had a 33 percent increase in customer satisfaction.

You don’t need coding knowledge to create a chatbot. Because a few services, like ManyChat, help you easily create Messenger bots, there’s no reason not to have one.

Treat Customers like Human Beings

People are intelligent creatures with complex thoughts and feelings. Like most complex and intelligent creatures, people want to be treated like human beings. Talk to them with the same amiable disposition as you would with a friend. Even if you become frustrated (let’s say you’re dealing with a difficult customer), respond politely and professionally, even when it hurts.

There are a few things you can do to make your messages sound more human and less robot. You can call customers by their first names and sign your messages with your name to show you are not a chatbot. If appropriate to your brand, add stickers and emojis to your messages to lend a personal aspect to your responses.

Be Organized

There’s a way to make your conversations less overwhelming whenever you open Messenger—it’s called organization. If you have a Facebook page, you can easily manage all of your messages from the Inbox tab of your page. You can create folders for read and unread messages, messages you replied to, ongoing conversations, and messages you have not yet replied to. If there’s a particularly important message you want to easily spot, you can mark it with a star icon.

Facebook pages allow you to organize messages

Once you organize your inbox, you won’t have to spend time hunting down messages or, worse, lose important conversations in your pile of unread messages. When you have an organized inbox, you can also easily allocate tasks to your chat support team, if you have one. For example, if one person is in charge of responding to messages, that person can easily find all of his tasks under the “unread” folder. Similarly, if another is in charge of responding to important messages, that person can easily find important messages marked with a star.

Don’t Let the Holiday Season Overwhelm You

As Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Christmas quickly approach, customers will be scrambling to buy the perfect holiday gift. When they contact you for any reason, don’t be overwhelmed. You have three new tricks up your sleeve to make this holiday season easier.

Written by Anne Felicitas, editor at AdvertiseMint, Facebook advertising agency

The post How to Manage an Influx of Customer Messages This Holiday Season appeared first on AdvertiseMint.