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This article was published on December 9, 2015

Why you should skip customer support hotlines and contact businesses on Facebook


Why you should skip customer support hotlines and contact businesses on Facebook Image by: Facebook

Facebook Pages are useful not only for keeping up with brands you love, but also for customer support. The social network has rolled out a bunch of new features to improve your experience of getting in touch with businesses.

Facebook used to measure and display Pages’ chat response times itself, but now Page owners can set their own average response time indicators, choosing from “within minutes,” “within an hour,” “within hours” or “within a day.”

That helps to give customers an idea of how long they might have to wait for a reply, while also allowing page managers some flexibility. These indicators will also show up in Messenger threads when you begin chatting with a business.

A new ‘away’ status indicator on Pages will let you know if a business can’t respond immediately. Plus, if you message a page when it’s set to ‘away’, you’ll see a custom message explaining when you can expect a reply or where you can find more information.

Page owners can now view past interactions and notes about your customer history
Credit: Facebook
Page owners can now view past interactions and notes about your customer history

Plus, by having your entire message history on hand, Facebook’s helping businesses address the common problem of knowing when a customer has been in touch before and what for.

That means that all your conversations with a brand, whether on its Page or its website, will be available to Page managers along with notes they’ve made about your preferences. So if you’ve previously asked about when your order is scheduled to ship, you should be able to get a reply sooner than later.

Several companies already have dedicated staff handling customer queries almost instantly on Twitter, but with Facebook’s latest update, it’s likely that you’ll soon be able to get help on the social network just as quickly.

Hopefully you’ll no longer need to waste hours on hold with customer support from now on.

New Tools for Managing Communication on Your Page [Facebook for Business]

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