You and your brand are no strangers to social media. Neither are your customers!

But did you know that your social media team can also handle Direct Messages (DMs) on social media in the same way as a live chat website integration?

Your brand may be used to thinking of live chat services as being exclusive to websites, but in this article, we are going to detail to you how some of the benefits of live chat can now be extended to social media to answer customers in real-time. Provide customers with the information they need, quickly, in a form they are used to communicating with.

Customers may want to use a live-chat experience for many reasons, such as:

• Ask questions about your product and services

• Check on stock availability

• Inquire about any upcoming sales and promotions

• Get store open and close information for physical locations

• Get help on how to use the product

• Provide a feedback or compliment

Did you know that 48% of consumers surveyed said they have used social media to share a positive customer experience? An even larger statistic, Twilio recently shared that 89% of consumers want to talk to brands via messaging channels.

Before we share more of how it works, let’s talk about some of the benefits you may not have thought of yet.

With AI-supported live chat platform integrated into social media DMs, your brand and community management team have more benefits at their fingertips.

Benefits in Productivity:

• Speak to more than one customer at a time without having to switch between multiple social platforms

• Track social media team performance, helping managers give feedback and set goals

• Ability to switch from automated chat to a live agent when needed with smart routing features

• Chat maintains history with customers, so no need to ask for the same information they already provided

• Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology to answer questions when offline or to assist customers before speaking to a live agent

• Ability to engage with customers when and where they are online, regardless of if they are in front of their computer to use a web chat or have time to send an email

Benefits in Sales:

• Show reliability and increase trust in customers

• Decrease drop-off rate and abandoned carts by shoppers through saved information

• Ability to directly link to products to customers and upsell

• Collects customer data for digital advertising retargeting campaigns

• Increase social media engagement

• Automate follow up on sales enquiries

Benefits to Customers:

• Customers don’t need to worry about operating hours, they can reach your AI chat regardless of the hour

• During times where a customer can’t speak, due to environment or ability, they can be assisted

• Customers can get information quickly (almost instantly) without having to wait on the phone to listen for the options available in the menu

• Customers need not download another app and sign in just to chat with the support team, they can chat on their favourite chat apps (eg. Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Telegram) that they have already installed.

• Customers do not need to be logged on the website all the time to wait for a live chat response, they can receive the message directly in their messaging inbox on their mobile phone as soon as the call agent replies.

In fact, nearly 86% of customers were satisfied with their experiences using business live chat features. With so many benefits to both parties, it’s no wonder that live chat is such a helpful tool.

Beyond customer service and support, modern messaging solutions provide even stronger components in marketing tool for leads acquisition as well as advertising methods, like with Google Business Messages Click-to-Message ads.

AI-supported live chat, both on websites and social media, has many advanced features not included in traditional live chat tools.

Standard live chat software includes:

• Answers for FAQs, typically stored in a form of knowledge base articles

• Give customers the option to submit information even when a live chat associate is unavailable

• Persistent chat advisor, allowing customers to speak to the same person no matter when they chat in

• Send supplemental material to the customer, like photos, discounts, files, or links

• Gather customer feedback after the chat to track service satisfaction

• Store information to reference should the customer speak on multiple occasions with your agents

AiChat Conversational Service Suite comes with all of the above, as well as advanced features for optimum client success, which are further discussed below.Conversational Chat, Not Another Search Engine

When the customers message a brand, they are expecting the answers to be summarized in concise and easily digestible conversational format instead of providing a link that redirects them a lengthy article for them read and find out the answer themselves.Advanced Ticketing Engine and Smart Routing

The standard chat history and persistent chat advisor options are nice, but these advanced features expand the benefits to customers and agents. All social media and web chat requests that require human assistance from your team are logged in a built-in ticketing engine. This engine will help your team ensure that all requests are tracked, prioritized, and resolved in a timely fashion, especially useful for large enterprises with call centres that handle huge volume of inquiries.

As customers start the conversation, the live chat request is routed to the correct specialist for their concern based on certain preset rules and parameters. This minimizes time for the customer, as they don’t need to explain the concern or question to multiple agents, and they are assigned to the most qualified expert right away. This helps increase customer satisfaction and trust.

Additionally, every team member is added to their own designated queues based on their skills, department or language. This helps assist in that routing. As an agent’s expertise grows, their queue settings can be updated. Set your team up for success and help increase your customer’s trust at the same time with features built for growth.

AiChat analytics dashboard also allows the manager to monitor and see a marked improvement in your chat agent performance. The agent tracking goes further than the number of tickets open and closed but also shares the agent’s average satisfaction rate, so improvement goals can be set along the way.AI-Assisted Live Chat

To increase the efficiency and comfort of your team using AI-Assisted live chat, AiChat knowledge base management tool is prepopulated suggested response templates based on the customer comment and displays them based on the confidence level. From there, the live agent determines the best-suggested answer to apply to the case.

These templated response suggestions are not simply keyword-based search, but also include advance NLP and contextual A.

I technology for accuracy.

Social media is an ideal place for two-way communication between your brand and customer, through comments, posts, DMs, and stories.

The first way to engage with a customer on social media is simply to respond to them. Customers want to be heard and acknowledged, so if they are proactively reaching out - make sure you have a tool that can track those engagements and respond.

Take these responses further with our “Comment to Message” feature, as it helps you not only address common questions from customers but also helps sell products automatically.

When a customer comments on Facebook posts, Ads or live stream videos, the chatbot will send the customer a DM helping address their question. A public reply to their initial comment is also added, asking them to check their DMs. This helps bring the conversation into a private place to funnel the customer through your marketing cycle, while also showing to the public that you are quick to respond. It’s a win-win to increase efficiencies, increase profits, and help customers all through Comment to Messenger with AiChat.

But if you are already keeping tabs on your brand’s mentions (earned or owned), there is another step you can take to bring customer service to the forefront of your social media presence.

Create a Customer Service Only Social Media Account - Yes, Really!

If you are taking in a high volume of customer service messages on your main business account, your company may benefit from creating a second account. This will help keep promotional content and support content separate from your organic marketing. Partnering both your main brand account and your support account into AiChat platform can help you create custom goals and systems to discuss customer needs.

You would create a second account in the same way you made the first, except for a few key details. Social media support accounts should have a few main features:

• Mention word(s) in the username to help customers understand the goal of the account like - Help, Support, Ask or Customer Care

• The bio of the main account should link to the support account for assistance

• Support account should mention support turnaround time or hours of operation (if you are using a chatbot you may skip this step)

• Link to where to contact or chat with you (eg. include shorten vanity URL such as https://m.me/<brandname> for Facebook Messenger or https://wa.me/<number> for WhatsApp)

Having the above set up for your new support-focused account will help you set expectations with your customers. Also, it better differentiates goals across each account.

AiChat integrates as a multi-channel solution in our Conversational Service Suite. Take the conversation with your customers further by using social media as your main customer support hub! With so many customers engaging over social media as their main communication tool, using automated systems through AiChat will save you time and help you succeed.

Meet your business goals with an award-winning chatbot provider, bringing you the one solution for web chat, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram, Google’s Business Messages and more.

If increased conversions, streamlined processes, and automation sound like the next step in your brand, AiChat can help.AiChat offers a suite of AI-powered conversational products for customer engagement and marketing automation at a cost-effective price. To begin automating this valuable lifecycle customer experience strategy, discover our solution by requesting a demo today.