If you are looking to improve your business processes, the last thing that you may consider is using social media to do so. In this article we will be looking at the ways you can improve business processes by adding social media into the mix.
Customer service
If you are looking to improve business processes, one of the most important aspects to focus on would be to improve customer service. Social media is an ideal way to promptly detect and correct customer problems and complaints. Not only does this make sure customers are happy, it also reflects on you as a business and shows that you are willing to rectify issues and that you care about your customers. In an age where mishaps are likely to go ‘viral’, it is important to manage the reputation of your business and deal with negative comments or reviews head on. Remember, happy customers lead to repeat business and can even result in them becoming advocates for your brand.
Feedback
Obtaining feedback from customers is crucial in order to improve business processes. By using social media, you can obtain customer feedback in order to give them the best customer experience. This is valuable as you may have the best expertise in your industry but your professional knowledge will never be as valuable to business performance than customer insights. Customer feedback provides you with an insight as to what is working well about your product or service and what can be done to make the experience better.
Locating new vendors, service providers and employees
Professional networks such as LinkedIn can greatly improve business processes by utilising them to find suppliers, service providers and employees. LinkedIn makes it easy to search for industry-specific personnel and companies meaning you can locate new vendors and service providers with ease. When it comes to recruitment, 67% of job seekers use social media to gain insights into company culture which shows how the power of social media can be used to make a judgement of your business. Portraying a business personality through your social media channels can help you reach more candidates, therefore filling staffing requirements more easily.
Collecting market intelligence
Market research is an important aspect when it comes to improving business processes. You can collect intelligence on your industry and competitors by watching content on appropriate social media. This is known as ‘Social Listening’. Social listening gives brands an opportunity to track, analyse and respond to conversations about them on social media. It’s a crucial component of audience research. By tracking these conversations on social media, you can analyse them for insights to discover opportunities to act. This could be something as small as responding to a happy customer, or something as big as shifting your entire brand positioning.
Driving neighbourhood traffic to brick-and-mortar stores
If you are wanting to increase footfall, you no longer have to worry about it being slow. You can use social media to encourage foot traffic and new customers to your store. By using geolocation services such as Google My Business or creating a campaign on Facebook with the ‘Store Traffic’ objective, you can ensure that there will be no more empty shops!
Marketing is only part of your company, but all of your company is marketing. Social media is a ripe environment for this hypothesis, where every part of a company from human resources to sales can be involved.
