Facebook Rolls Out Social CRM Features To Help Businesses Interact Better

Facebook announced this week that it will be rolling out several new features over the next couple of months that would assist businesses in better interacting with and responding to customers on the platform. Consumers are increasingly reaching out to businesses on the platform for many reasons – to ask questions, inquire about orders or voice complaints – and Facebook is hoping that by providing businesses with these additional tools, it will make it easier for Page admins to communicate with these customers.

Facebook previously rolled out a “Very Responsive” badge that showed on a businesses page if they responded to 90 percent of messages within 5 minutes or less. While this standard may be a challenge for some businesses, including dealerships, one of the new features Facebook is rolling out is the ability for the business to indicate publicly how quickly they respond to messages – within minutes, hours or a business day. In addition, Facebook will allow businesses to indicate publicly when they are “away” and are not able to respond in effort to inform the customer how promptly they should expect a response. Along with this comes the ability for Facebook pages to set up automatic responses to people who interact with the page for the first time which could be emails thanking the customer, providing answers to frequently asked questions or simply notifying them how quickly they should expect a response.

Additionally, Facebook is rolling out features that allow businesses to better see and respond to comments left on the page. Facebook will also provide some information about the person interacting with the business including any public information like city and state they live in. Page admins will have the ability to assign tags to conversations making them easier to find in the future as well as show all previous interactions that a user has had with the business and include notes about the customer should they desire.

These changes should be welcomed by Page admins and could prove very useful for Page admins in managing their interactions with customers. The ability to add notes and see past interactions will allow businesses to provide a more personalized response and level of familiarity that was not possible before within Facebook itself. While third party software has existed for a while that provided these features, chances are that very few businesses took advantage of them. By integrating these social CRM like features into its platform, Facebook is certainly displaying its desire for businesses to interact with users and utilize the platform as an extension of their customer service efforts.