Welcome back to our Christmas blog series ‘Digital Santa Presents …’ With the help of the Digital Santa, we will be talking you through how to optimise your website this Christmas.

In our last post, Digital Santa was gifting all he knows about mobile-friendliness. This week, he bears gifts regarding customer service and Social Media – an integral part of any business.

We want to help you keep your customers cheery this Christmas and mastering this art will definitely be a ‘Claus for celebration!’

Over the festive season customers will be flocking Social media for customer service for inquiries on products they might want to get for Christmas. So Digital Santa wants you to be prepared!

Provide your customers a merry service

Social media and customer service now come hand in hand. Big companies in particular would definitely suffer if they didn’t have customer support on either Twitter or Facebook. So why is it that customer service and social media are always in each other’s pocket?  It is because social media is virtually inescapable, with over 60% of the UK population having a Facebook account. If you don’t have a social following it is hard to cater to so many different people that are constantly glued to their social media accounts. Your brand would be near invisible if it’s not online.

How are brands revolutionising customer service?

Considering social media is such a key factor for not only building a brand but engaging customers as well, customer service can sometimes be tricky. Out of our 64.1 million population we have 38 million active users of social media. Not only are brands constantly in the public eye of other customers/followers, they also have to disarm situations very carefully as not to hurt their brand image. This can be done in many ways, here are some examples of big brands handling such situations:

Xbox Support: The companies that are really good at online service dedicate an account to customer support on Twitter or Facebook. This shows that they are committed to serving the needs of their customers and Xbox has even won a Guinness world record for ‘Most responsive brand on Twitter’ (As of July 2010). An Xbox is one of the most popular gifts to get at Christmas with Microsoft selling 6.6 million Xboxes over the holiday period last year, so having such a powerful customer interaction service is essential in keeping a positive image.

Waterstones: A man got locked inside the Trafalgar Square branch of Waterstones for two hours. Luckily since someone was monitoring their Twitter account they were able to free him. This could have gone sour if no one was monitoring or listening to the customer service. The moral of the story is to always pay attention to your customer conversations online; you wouldn’t want them spending Christmas Eve stuck inside your store.

Sainsbury’s: Personalising each and every response to a customer can be really powerful.  Although many brands do this, Sainbury’s do it particularly well. This is done by the person monitoring and responding to customer querires at the time by signing their name at the end of the tweet, making it become more engaging and personal.

Taco Bell: The Californian fast food restaurant is known for its quick customer interactions and comebacks often resulting in hilarious replies. This gives them a lot of media attention from companies such as Huffington Post and Buzzfeed. What they’ve done is establish their own tone, and their laid back attitude seems to have done wonders on social media.

What you can do this Christmas season

So what can you do to improve your customer service online? From some of the examples above we can see that setting your own unique tone and voice is highly effective. Also signing tweets at the end to make it more personal is a great way to humanise interactions with customers which could be a key ingredient to express Christmas cheer. Sometimes having a sense of humour (within limits) will also bring its own set of benefits and perhaps indulging in some Christmas jokes and puns may prove favourable.