Facebook just announced new updates that you may have already begun to notice in your business page settings. Here are three of them that are sure to help your company’s customer service on this social media platform.
Page Responsiveness
Remember when your page asked your to respond to messages quickly so that you could be seen as a ‘Very Responsive’ page to your followers? Well, that feature, introduced in September, is now getting a much needed upgrade.
You’ll notice if you go to your page Settings, there is a new tab called “Messaging” which gives you some information on Response Times and Instant Replies… if you’re into that sort of thing.
“Starting this month all Pages can set the average time it takes for them to reply to messages. Admins can choose to show that they respond either “within minutes,” “within an hour” “within hours” or “within a day”. Average response times for Pages are calculated for each Page automatically and the response time shown on the Page defaults to their average response time, but admins can now control what response time shows publicly on their Page. So even if a Page typically responds to messages within an hour, they can set their visible response time to within a day and set customer expectations accordingly.”
One of the new features that I find helpful is the fact that you can now set your status to “away” so that people know that you are not currently available to respond to their message/comment. Facebook will still be rating your response time, but not when your “away” status is up, so keep that in mind!
Inbox Redesign
You might also notice changes to your Messages Inbox. For example, you can view the bio information on person you’re speaking with for a better and more personal customer experience.
This new inbox displays an array of information about the person your are communicating with including when you last spoke. Admins can also take private notes on the conversation, so you could record their purchase history or certain preferences that person has that you’d like to remember for your next conversation. These notes are viewable to page admins only. But wait… there’s more! You can also categorize and tag conversations to better organize your inbox… kind of like email. Pretty nifty, Facebook.
New Activity Tab
You might not have noticed this one as Facebook used to have an Activity tab… but this tool is way better at tracking conversations on your page.
“This new tool offers admins a single place to view and respond to customer comments on both desktop and mobile. Admins can flag interactions for follow up, reply privately or mark them as done, helping them keep better track of comments in need of responses and eliminating the risk of skipping over a customer comment.”
This one hasn’t rolled out everywhere yet, but is something to look out for as a useful tool for the future. One thing’s for sure… Facebook is still not going anywhere, at least for a while, in my opinion.Looking forward to continuing to improve business with it as long as it remains a relevant and an integral part of the marketing world.
@Stephsandy Consulting, LLC