How to Elevate Social Media Customer Care

Anthony Romero at Genesys breaks down how integrating social media into your contact centre strategy can transform fragmented customer interactions into seamless, scalable and emotionally intelligent experiences.

Social media has become a critical channel for customer engagement. Customers expect quick and personalised responses on the platforms they use daily – whether it’s Facebook, X or other channels.

In fact, according to a survey Genesys conducted in 2024, 52% of consumer respondents surveyed who said they’ve shared a negative experience on social media reported doing so to prompt direct attention from the brand in order to resolve a problem.

But without the right tools, managing social media interactions can feel disconnected from traditional customer service channels. And that can create a disjointed – and frustrating – customer experience (CX).

By integrating social media listening and engagement directly into the contact centre, brands can provide a truly omnichannel customer experience by breaking down silos between marketing and customer support to create a seamless approach to social media interactions.

Why Social Media Belongs in Your CX Strategy

Social media customer care is frequently managed separately from the contact centre, resulting in fragmented conversations, delayed responses and unsatisfactory customer experiences.

While contact centres excel at handling customer interactions, a frequent scenario is that the marketing team will focus on managing the public narrative on social platforms, often with an eye on promoting the brand. But when marketing leads these interactions, it can create silos of customer information.

Often, customers will then receive assistance without the full context, forcing them to repeat their issues or endure transfers. They might even need to resubmit their issues on the company’s website through a form.

In contrast, managing these exchanges within the contact centre can help to resolve the problems, sometimes achieving a first-contact resolution instead of having to escalate. And that can lead to a significantly better overall customer experience.

Here’s why integrating social media channels into your contact centre CX strategy is crucial.

Proactive Engagement

Social listening allows brands to identify and engage with customers before they escalate issues through traditional support channels, reducing inbound contact volume and handling costs by directing traffic away from more cost-prohibitive engagements like voice.

Unified Agent Experience

With artificial intelligence (AI)-driven sentiment analysis, customer posts are classified as positive, negative or neutral.

This helps teams prioritise responses efficiently. Agents can then engage using the same routing and queueing system as other interactions, ensuring consistency across all customer touchpoints.

Holistic Customer View

By capturing social data from keywords, accounts or hashtags, brands gain a comprehensive view of the customer journey, leading to more personalised and effective interactions while avoiding the frustrating aspect of having customers repeat themselves.

Best Practices for Social Media Care in the Contact Centre

It’s easy to list the pitfalls of improperly managed social media, from missing valid customer enquiries to damaging a brand’s reputation. Instead of focusing on those, let’s look at some best practices for improving the overall customer experience and enhancing efficiency.

1. Leverage AI and Automation for Smarter Engagements

AI-powered tools can support agents with real-time insights and suggested responses. This helps to ensure faster and more relevant replies to social media posts.

Automated escalation rules can also route critical posts to the right teams and AI-powered predictive routing can then move these conversations to the right available agent. This can reduce transfers and boost first-contact resolution rates.

2. Prioritise Posts with Sentiment Analysis

Not every social post requires a response, but some demand immediate attention. AI-driven sentiment analysis helps identify urgent customer concerns, allowing businesses to respond proactively before frustrations escalate.

3. Give Agents a Single View into Interactions

Agents shouldn’t have to juggle multiple platforms to manage customer interactions. With Social, teams can respond to social media inquiries from the same interface used for voice, SMS, WhatsApp and email. This eliminates inefficiencies and allows agents to provide a more consistent and personalised experience.

4. Establish Clear Escalation Rules

Defining social escalation rules helps to ensure that the right posts reach the right people. For example, brands can set conditions such as:

• A post must contain specific keywords to be escalated.
• A post must include one keyword but exclude another to qualify for agent review.

This automated approach allows high-priority posts to be addressed quickly while filtering out noise. In addition, brands can customise these rules based on the platform.

For example, they might prefer to have less strict escalation rules for posts on a specific platform, automatically routing more of those to agents as it might be perceived as more strategically important to the brand.

5. Be Aware of and Manage Public and Direct Message Social Interactions

A crucial aspect of engaging in public social interactions is recognising that you’re operating in a public space. However, not every part of a conversation needs to be or should be publicly shared.

Demonstrating responsiveness is valuable. In many cases, it’s best to acknowledge a customer’s inquiry publicly, provide a brief indication of a potential resolution, and then mention that you’ll follow up with them privately for more details.

This allows the agent to continue the conversation via direct message (DM) and work toward a resolution effectively.

6. Use Social Data to Continuously Improve CX

By analysing customer conversations across social media, businesses can uncover trends, identify common pain points and refine their customer service approach.

A strong feedback loop between marketing and customer support creates insights from social interactions that can be used to enhance products, services and customer communication strategies.

For low-hanging fruit, this can also inform automated escalation rules. For example, examining performance metrics through filters like topics; languages; content type (text, images or videos); platforms; and countries to locate criteria that could be used to automatically escalate incoming posts to available agents.

Scaling Social Media Support Without Overwhelming Agents

One of the biggest challenges of social media customer care is scaling without overloading your team. Social makes this possible by:

• Providing agents with AI-assisted recommendations for faster, more accurate responses.
• Streamlining workflows so that social media interactions follow the same routing and queueing rules as voice, email and other channels.
• Reducing the number of websites agents have to work from through unified interfaces. Whether it’s Genesys Cloud, Salesforce or other systems via an embedded framework, agents can help customers without having to hop between different platforms.

That also means agents can easily switch between publicly responding on a social media site and then immediately following it up with a private DM to the same user.

They also have the ability to change channels (like switch to voice or email) and still keep the conversation linked to the same customer profile and interaction.

In addition to managing interactions, agent should also have access to the information they need to learn about the customer and their recent interactions with your brand.

With native AI solutions and ease-of-use focused design, organizations can efficiently scale social engagement while reducing agent burnout, allowing for a high-quality customer experience across all digital touchpoints.

This blog post has been re-published by kind permission of Genesys – View the Original Article

For more information about Genesys - visit the Genesys Website

Call Centre Helper is not responsible for the content of these guest blog posts. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of Call Centre Helper.

Author: Genesys
Reviewed by: Megan Jones