Customers hate waiting, and when it comes to customer service, that's key.
In today's fast-paced digital environment, a brand's social media response time is vital to building long-term customer relationships. Rapid responses demonstrate commitment to customers, which leads to increased brand satisfaction, loyalty, and reputation.
However, many brands struggle to improve response times due to team and resource constraints, and quality often suffers. With the right technology, you can overcome these challenges and deliver faster, more personalized care seamlessly and efficiently.
Read on to find out how quickly consumers expect brands to respond and what you can do to speed up your social media interactions and exceed customer expectations.
What is social media response time?
Social media response time is the time it takes a business to respond to a customer message or inquiry on a social network, including the time it takes to understand the question, gather contextual information, and reply.
How quickly do people expect a response on social media?
According to the 2023 Sprout Social Index™, the majority of consumers (69%) want brands to respond within 24 hours, and 16% want responses within minutes — a 3% increase from 2022. This isn't surprising considering that the same report found that 53% of consumers say their social media usage has increased in the past two years compared to the two years prior.
In an age of social media saturation, as brands compete for consumer attention to reach new audiences, a brand’s social media response time is a differentiator. Brands must respond to customer preferences at the speed of social media or lose out to the competition.
Why social media response times are so important
Here are some data-backed reasons why brands should prioritize social media as a support channel.
Customers rely on social support
According to data from Intercom, nearly half of support teams say they've seen a 51% increase in inbound volume as a result of COVID-19. Additionally, a recent survey of 3,251 U.S. consumers conducted by PTMNTS Intelligence showed that 43% of Gen Z customers prefer to shop on a brand's website, 53% more than the average consumer.
These factors have led consumers to turn to social media more than ever before to contact brands and provide feedback. In fact, Sprout's Q1 Consumer Pulse Survey of over 2,000 consumers in the UK and US revealed that 80% of consumers have used social media to engage with brands about their customer service needs over a year ago now.
Social media is faster than email and eliminates the need for tedious customer service phone conversations, giving consumers 24/7 access to your brand at the touch of their fingertips.
Faster response times increase customer loyalty
A 2023 PWC survey found that 61% of executives believe improving customer service is their top priority to drive brand loyalty. Sixty-one percent also said personalizing the customer experience is a top priority. This isn't surprising, since 32% of consumers say they have stopped using or buying from a company after a bad experience with customer service.
Without consistency and attention to customer care, you’re not “guaranteed” to gain repeat customers and brand advocates, and in the age of digital marketing, social media response times are becoming more and more important as it becomes the center of customer service.
Brands are realizing this: just look at McDonald's response: their team responded to customer complaints within 15 minutes.
Responsive customer service gives you a competitive advantage
Fast response times on social media are key to keeping customers from defecting to your competitors: Salesforce reports that 89% of consumers are more likely to stay with a brand and purchase again if the customer service is positive.
The good news is that as expectations for social media responsiveness increase, so do your chances of meeting and satisfying your customers before they look elsewhere. In the next section, we'll show you how to achieve this with the right strategies and tools.
6 Ways to Improve Your Social Media Response Time
You know you need to improve your customer service response times, but how do you go about doing it? Here are six ideas to help you create a social media response plan that addresses your customers' concerns as quickly as possible.
1. Consolidate your social communications into one platform
If a brand has multiple social media accounts, it needs to monitor all customer messages on each account and respond accurately and quickly. For example, Sephora offers quick social media responses on Instagram.
…X (formerly Twitter)…
…and Facebook.
But as you scale and your team grows, manually managing multiple social media accounts can become difficult, time-consuming, and error-prone.
An all-in-one social media platform like Sprout allows you to funnel messages from all your social platforms into one unified, smart inbox so your team can work from a single source of truth, simplifying tasks and improving team performance.
The tool also helps create a seamless and transparent workflow for your social customer service team to quickly manage and respond to incoming messages. The collision detection feature further enhances collaboration, making work more transparent and ensuring that two team members do not respond to the same query at the same time.
2. Use suggested replies and AI tools to address common concerns
AI-enabled tools can help customer care agents resolve issues faster by automating responses to common customer inquiries. For example, Sprout's Suggested Reply It uses machine learning to analyze incoming messages and detect if you've received similar comments or queries before.
Unlike canned responses, suggested replies allow agents to personalize their responses to make them more authentic and add contextual details, saving time and being especially helpful for team members with different experience levels, and helping you maintain a consistent brand voice when answering similar questions.
Below is an example of an auto-generated yet personalized response from McDonald's:
Similarly, Sprout Social's Enhance by AI Assist allows customer care teams to personalize responses based on the tone of the incoming message so that responses match the customer's emotional state. Agents can make responses sound formal or friendly, delivering a customized experience at scale.
3. Improve response times with dedicated customer care tools
Another way to speed up your social media response times is to use tools designed specifically for customer service. Dedicated customer care tools, like Sprout Social's Social Customer Care, can help your team improve their speed and productivity through features like case management. This feature gives your care team an overall view of message volume and the status of the most relevant cases, so they can manage customer interactions quickly and effectively.
Additionally, integrations like Salesforce Service Cloud allow agents to quickly gather additional context and use the additional information to improve responses and ensure smooth, consistent communication.
A dedicated customer care tool can also help you gather customer insights through automated NPS and CSAT surveys. You can customize settings to trigger surveys after an issue is resolved to understand the level of customer satisfaction and areas for improvement.
4. Use chatbots to route questions efficiently
Social media automation tools like chatbots can help improve your social response times, providing 24/7 support interactions with customers and instant service even when a human agent isn't available.
These are great for answering frequently asked questions and directing customers to the right support channel (email, live chat, etc.) when a question becomes too complex, reducing initial wait times.
5. Prioritize social mentions based on urgency
With the right social customer care tools, you can create customer service tiers to handle urgent messages and improve social media response times. For example, Sprout's case management solution allows you to set criteria such as topic, profile type, message type, VIP status, and message sentiment to create cases to speed up your workflow and resolve issues faster.
Having a layered response strategy is also a key part of a brand’s social media crisis communications plan for dealing with a potential brand crisis and notifying agents when there is a spike in brand mentions.
While all social mentions are important, the reality is that some mentions are more important than others, especially when they have the potential to impact your revenue or reputation more than a friendly shout-out. Prioritizing messages based on urgency can help you address this need.
6. Set benchmarks to improve average response times
Just like analyzing the performance of your posts to see what resonates with your audience, analyzing your social media response times can reveal opportunities to improve your team’s productivity.
Sprout's social customer care solution helps you proactively track response metrics through comprehensive average response time reports for in-depth insights. Case team activity report Get actionable insights to help your agents improve response rates.
Transform customer care by reducing social media response times
Modern customer care requires modern solutions, and time is of the essence in a competitive environment. With the right strategies and technology in place, you can quickly improve your social media response times, minimize disruptions and improve the overall customer experience. This proactive approach helps you earn customer loyalty, build true connections, and delight your customers.
Learn more about the role of social media in modern customer service.
