On February 16th ClickZ and Lithium presented the webinar "Delighting Customers with Social Media Marketing & Customer Care: Trends and Best Practice from Experts", now available on demand. With 80% of brands believing they provide good social customer service but only 8% of customers agreeing, it is easy to see there is a disparity between perception and reality in this space.             So how do companies go about improving their social media customer care? Leslie Jordan of @LithiumTech, Anthony Kronshage of @TELUSsupport, Chris Brennan of @ScottishPower, and myself shared some of the following insights and strategies to creating customer delight through social media care. 1. Engagement is great but frequent engagement is even better. A Forrester study showed that those who engage in social media have a 54% likelihood of having made a purchase from a brand in the post 12 months. Additionally, the same study showed that increasing engagement can almost double the amount of purchases made in a twelve-month period. Despite the fact that brands now understand the importance of social care, European businesses are less likely to be socially effective. This could be attributed to the businesses not using social media to its fullest potential. A survey study conducted by BCG and NICE found that European consumers are underserved by social media customer service. 33% of those surveyed were not using social media for customer service because it takes too long to resolve issues. 2. Providing personalised engagement shows customers a brand cares about them With 68% of customers saying they have stopped using a brand because they thought they brand didn’t care about them, it’s important that brands live up to the expectations of their customers. This includes engaging with them on social media. Leslie Jordan from Lithium shared best practice tips on how to delight your customers: Know your audience – personalise engagement. Empower the support team – give them the tools they need to resolve issues quickly. Streamline collaboration – coordinate marketing campaigns with customer service teams. Measure results – understand the customer experience by tracking NPS and CSAT. @SpotifyCares is an example of a company using innovative and personalised customer care to turn a negative customer experience into a delightful experience. In the webinar, Leslie described how the music brand replied to a Twitter user who threatened to leave them for Apple Music because they couldn’t find Perfect Illusion by Lady Gaga. But the experience kept going. So when their customer thanked her, they linked to a song titled ‘Great Weekend’ to thank her. And when the customer replied with a marriage proposal, @SpotifyCares replied with a playlist that used the titles of songs to spell out their message back. The response went viral. 3. Empower your team with a virtuous content cycle By empowering their social support team and using a ‘virtuous content cycle’, @TELUSsupport is able to provide relevant content to their audience expeditiously. This helps drive their social strategy but also engages their social content team and encourages them to get behind a common goal.                                     Anthony Kronshage from @TELUSsupport stressed that collaboration and communication is an integral way for marketers and social care teams to make the brand experience better for their customers. Marketers need to take advantage of the insights from their social care teams to measure the success of a campaign. 4. Focus on collaboration to go from ‘fighting fires to total community’ In the highly regulated energy industry, @ScottishPower uses social media primarily for customer service issues. On the webinar Chris Brennan remarked: “You can do the best social marketing in the world, but if your social care is not working then your efforts are worthless.”               They use a central digital hub and collaborate with all the customer engagement teams with an aim to integrate social media with traditional CRM systems to provide a better customer experience. View the webinar to hear more Lots more was shared on the webinar session, including answering questions from the ClickZ community, so do make sure to watch the webinar on demand or tweet to @LithiumTech to share your thoughts. Want to know more about how Lithium’s Social Customer Care solution supports Spotify, TELUS and Scottish Power? Please visit: http://lith.tc/ClickZ For more information on how you can get involved with the ClickZ Webinar Series please contact sam.lawson@clickz.com.   This webinar was produced in association with Lithium. Views and opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ClickZ. Click here to read our collaborative content guidelines.   This original article was posted by Andrew Warren-Payne on ClickZ.com.  ... View more