Social media

To use social media for customer service, you should monitor your social media accounts like Facebook and X/Twitter for customer communication like comments or queries, and address customers in a timely and appropriate manner. Due to the volume on social platforms, this can sometimes be too time-consuming to manually monitor. At this point, leveraging social listening capabilities becomes ideal; you can track across specific accounts or keywords and then use AI for sentiment analysis to help more efficiently detect those needing a response.

Social media customer service is important because it’s where many customers engage. They might prefer to reach out to companies on social media, or they might voice their concerns or experiences there. Positive and timely responses can improve customer satisfaction, protect your brand’s reputation and even win new customers.

Traditionally, customer support teams respond to customer queries and issues on social media by monitoring their accounts, acknowledging the customer’s message and addressing their concern. Depending on the issue, the response could involve resolving the problem, providing information, apologizing for a mistake or escalating the issue. It’s important to respond promptly, maintain a professional tone and demonstrate a commitment to resolving the issue.

This process can be more effective, though, through leveraging AI and automatic escalation rules to minimize manual monitoring of accounts and instead automatically surface pressing customer issues toward agent queues.

A social media contact center is a customer engagement hub where agents manage interactions that come in through social media platforms.

In the case of Genesys Cloud, this becomes part of a unified contact center experience — allowing agents to handle social messages alongside voice, chat, email and other channels in one workspace. It enables businesses to respond faster, maintain context across touchpoints and deliver consistent, personalized support directly on the platforms customers use every day.

It’s important in today’s connected landscape that your brand is present where your customers look for you — and that includes social media. Customer service tools that specifically help you manage your social interactions are a great way to meet customers where they are.

Customers aren’t just reading your social posts — they want to interact, and that’s only possible if you’re constantly aware of who’s saying what on all your platforms. Your customer service team members need to see customer complaints on social media, both general and specific, so they can be dealt with. That means responding to customer feedback, and it means having a record of previous interactions that could show more overarching problems that a product team may need to solve.

The most important thing to look for in social media customer service tools is ease of use for your customer service team.

But a lot can go into that. It’s not just a simple interface and sleek design — it needs to be able to house all of your social channels in a single interface, so that customer service agents don’t have to go searching for responses in multiple applications. It needs to provide instant notifications on brand mentions for rapid response, and of course you should be able to respond directly within the platform.

Your agents need to be able to see every social interaction in real time, and respond as quickly as possible — otherwise, your social media presence will fall behind quickly.

Genesys Cloud natively supports Facebook, X/Twitter and Instagram with more channels to be natively supported in the future. Customers needing to support more social media platforms can leverage open messaging APIs or an AppFoundry Marketplace solution called Genesys Cloud Universal Messaging.

With Genesys Cloud, the goal is for agents to manage all social media messages — across platforms like Facebook, Instagram, X/Twitter and more — from a single, unified workspace. This centralized view streamlines workflows, preserves context and allows agents to deliver faster, more personalized responses across every channel.

Promptly engaging with public posts on social media is a best practice. However, sometimes interactions require shifting to private, such as circumstances where account data or protected personal information (PPI) needs to be divulged. In situations like these, it’s optimal to leave a public response noting that you will be DMing them. This way others who see the exchange know that you were prompt in trying to resolve it.

With Genesys Cloud, agents can effortlessly shift a conversation from public to private. In fact, there is a drop-down to change a response if it should be public or a direct message, while threading it within the same conversation for maximum context.

Which social networks you should monitor depends on your business, your audience and your budget. An enterprise business should generally have some social media presence on every platform that has users because those customers expect to find you there; a smaller business can probably stick to core platforms like Facebook and Instagram. Different audiences will use different platforms more than others — an auto body shop doesn’t necessarily need to have a presence on TikTok (though it likely would help to stand out)!

Finally, your ability to devote customer service operations resources to social media will go a long way toward deciding where you can and can’t show up. If you can build a devoted social media and customer service team to service a wide variety of platforms, do it. But if your resources are more limited, you’ll need to be more picky.