10 awesome social media customer service examples

When you invest in your brand’s social media customer care team, they can excel. Spectrum demonstrates the value of such an investment: They tripled the staff on their social media team and onboarded Khoros, allowing them to process 200k posts within the first six months. To learn more about their story, read our case study.

Spectrum now has a dedicated support account on X, @Ask_Spectrum. The account is filled with social media customer service examples in which they respond to questions, complaints, and other inquiries. They also use the account to offer customers updates about service interruptions or general account changes.

Many of @Ask_Spectrum’s updates receive a fair amount of negative sentiment (nobody likes service interruption), but the care team does an excellent job of quickly, warmly, and helpfully replying:

Spectrum has also increased their social media customer care agent productivity by 57% through better organization and tracking, demonstrating that you don’t always need more agents; sometimes your care team just needs better organization and more helpful customer service software.

Spectrum sets itself apart from its competitors on social media through efficiency. Spectrum can reply at a rapid pace because they’ve invested in the right tools and a sizable team rather than relying on a few people to handle all requests.

Takeaways

• Invest in your social media customer service support teams and tools. In some cases, the right tools can help increase efficiency, so you don’t need a large team, but larger enterprise-level brands may require both.

• Greet negative inquiries with a quick and warm reply.

Responding to your audience is important, especially when they have a pressing concern. However, most brands cannot respond with equal speed to every social media inquiry. This is important, considering about half of social media users expect a brand to respond to a complaint in less than three hours. Khoros customer StubHub is an excellent example of ensuring you respond to everyone who needs it when they need it.

StubHub offers its audience rapid response times through issue prioritization. Some issues require an immediate response, like the example in the image on the left (below). Other mentions, while still important, are less urgent, like the example in the image on the right (below). Khoros helps StubHub prioritize customer issues that need an immediate response over posts that can wait a bit for a reply.

Takeaways

• Use issue prioritization to identify and respond to urgent inquiries immediately.

Social media users don’t just want answers from brands on digital channels; they want the correct answers, something that Khoros customer British Gas understands and prioritizes.

British Gas polled their customers and discovered that an accurate response was more important to them than a quick response. Now their social media team goes above and beyond to ensure questions are answered correctly the first time. They do this by following up with customers to get account information and check into issues rather than by simply following a script, which can lead to errors.

Your brand can ensure that you offer customers the correct response by organizing your incoming social media communications, effectively training staff on your social media team, and empowering them to use their knowledge and voice while remaining on message. In this way, you can put the customer first.

Takeaways

• Find out what your customers want. Do they prioritize accuracy or speed for social media customer service responses?

• Gather information and look into issues instead of following a predetermined script.

In today’s modern world, we can stream music online or offline through various apps and websites. Spotify, a well-known music, podcast, and audiobook app, is also a leader in the social media customer service space. In fact, they won a Webby Award for their social media customer support in 2015.

Like many brands, Spotify maintains a separate X account dedicated to customer support. In this example, a customer reached out about a potential feature of Spotify. Their support team promptly responded by providing more information, including a link to what devices are supported — which answered the customer’s original question and provided extra information to answer potential follow-up requests. They also ended their response by asking the customer to let them know if there’s anything else they need help with, leaving the conversation open if the customer has more questions.

Takeaways

• Answer customers’ original questions and look for opportunities to address potential follow-up requests.

• Leave the door open for more inquiries at the end of your response to ensure the customer is satisfied with the solution. It shows your commitment to providing an excellent customer service experience.

Zappos is renowned for its customer service, and its commitment to providing excellent customer service is even in its company mission statements. This extends to social media, and their mission statement can even be seen in their profile bios across social media channels. For example, Zappos bio on X says “Zappos is our name and service is our game!”.

As an online retailer, order mistakes sometimes happen. But what you do to fix the error is what matters most. When a customer received the wrong shoe size for her bachelorette party, Zappos went above and beyond.

After the customer contacted the Zappos support team about an incorrect shoe size for a bachelorette party, they overnighted the customer the correct size with a personalized note and a “wedding survival kit.” The customer posted about the extra effort Zappos took to make it right, expressing her gratitude on Facebook. Zappos responded promptly to the post, offering to go the extra mile again for the customer service representative who helped her out.

Takeaways

• Sometimes it’s worth going the extra mile to gain loyal and satisfied customers; they may even post about it on social media for other potential customers to see.

• Use the right tools, such as social media management software to never miss tags or brand mentions and to ensure a prompt response.

Nike’s approach to social media customer service helps it stand out as a brand that truly cares for its customers. Like Spectrum and Spotify, Nike has a dedicated customer service account, available in seven different languages. It’s a good idea since your customers will always know where to go if they need support.

In this example, a frantic customer contacted Nike’s social media support account for an issue with the company’s app. Nike calmly replied to let the customer know they would get to the bottom of this and asked several questions about their specific situation — even asking how the user holds the device while running. The Nike team’s response is a great example of how to calm and reassure customers who may be stressed about an issue. It’s also a great example of how to ask for a lot of information so the support team can troubleshoot the specific issue, which is a common theme among some of the brands we’ve discussed.

Takeaways

• Be calm and reassuring to customers, which lets them know you’re here to help them resolve their issues.

• Collect information about their specific situation, which may require straying from a script to offer better support.

The fast food chain Wendy’s is known for being sassy on social media. However, they still deliver great customer service in their unique brand voice. They understand that customer service is about more than just responding to issues; it also includes replying to random mentions and posts about the brand, like in the example below.

In this situation, a customer asked Wendy’s to settle a debate with their partner about whether hamburgers are sandwiches. Even though it wasn’t an actual customer service issue, the brand still responded promptly and in its renowned brand voice. The customer was thankful for the brand’s quick response, saying that it “ended the war before it could even begin.” while making it clear that efforts like this help Wendy’s stand apart from other fast food restaurants.

Takeaways

• Respond to mentions promptly, even when it’s not a serious issue.

As you’ve probably noticed, many people reach out on social media with questions better suited to be answered on other channels. If something can be resolved faster or easier through another channel, direct the user to that channel rather than trying to do it all on social media.

In the example below from Shopify, a user posts a question about recovering a deleted blog post. Shopify promptly responds telling them it may be possible, but directs the user to live chat on their website. Given the situation, the Shopify team likely realized they needed to handle this situation as soon as possible, and live chat would offer a faster resolution over a back-and-forth on social media.

Takeaways

• Don’t be afraid to move conversations off social media when the situation warrants channel switching. Route customers to the channel that’s most appropriate for resolving their issues.

Sometimes customers reach out with an issue, but don’t follow up when a brand responds. Some brands may leave it at that, assuming the customer found a solution through other means. However, brands committed to offering exceptional customer service on social media may check again to verify if the situation was actually resolved. By doing so, the brands show their dedication to helping customers rather than just responding and moving on.

The example below from Citibank shows this exact situation playing out. A customer posts about an extra charge in her payment history, and Citibank quickly responds but doesn’t hear back from the customer until the brand follows up a second time.

In this case, the customer resolved the issue on their own but was still thankful for Citibank’s follow-up and let them know they’d be in touch if there were further issues.

Takeaways

• When a customer posts an issue but doesn’t respond to your initial message, follow up to verify the issue has been resolved. Checking in reinforces your brand’s dedication to serving customers, not just responding to messages.

Social media is where people share thoughts and opinions, and sometimes, those can overlap with customer service through mentions that don’t have a clear answer. In the example below, a person posts about the high costs of mattresses and tags the brand Casper. The situation is tricky because it’s unlikely the customer service agent will be able to convince others in the organization to lower the cost of their products. However, they cleverly respond by posting links to pages that might be relevant like a low-priced product and financing page.

Just because a situation doesn’t have a clear answer, doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying to offer help. By offering a suggested solution, the agent in this situation may be able to help this customer and drive new sales from other people who see this message.

Takeaways

• When a situation doesn’t have a clear solution, tell agents to offer support with the resources they have. It might not be exactly what the customer wants, but making an effort shows the brand wants to help to the best of their ability.

Social media has revolutionized customer service — more and more customers turn to social media to ask questions, leave complaints, or find help with their orders. It’s now more important than ever to have a social media customer service strategy in place. Learn how Khoros can help you exceed expectations with every interaction by reinventing your social media strategy.

Check out our Digital Customer Care Playbook to learn how your brand can develop a best-in-class digital customer care strategy, or contact us to learn how we’ve helped clients create exceptional customer service experiences on social media. Meaningfully engage with your audience in real-time and keep customers for life by always being there in their moment of need.