Since the beginning of this millennium, social media has grown to become a part of everyday life for around 65 percent of the global population, or 96 percent of those with internet access. It’s a powerful tool for education, entertainment, and communication, and naturally, modern consumers often use social media for customer service when they want a brand to respond to their query or complaint.
At the same time, the rise of social media has also contributed to an environment where customer service is more important than ever. If a consumer has a bad experience with a brand, they can leave bad reviews on sites like TrustPilot, Google Reviews or Facebook, or even simply post about the problem on sites like X/Twitter or Reddit.
Too many negative comments on these channels will soon start to impact the brand’s reputation, potentially leading to fewer customers and falling revenues. So good customer service is a business critical part of the customer journey.
And that’s why social media needs to be integrated into your customer service contact center, instead of existing in a separate silo. If customers are just as likely (if not more) to voice issues on social rather than by phone or email, then it makes sense for the contact center to be able to handle social channels with the same level of efficiency as other communications.
In this blog we’ll look into why it’s a good idea for brands to integrate social engagement into their customer care strategy, and what’s involved in building a social media contact center.
Contents
Why Use Social Media for Customer Service?
What is a Social Media Contact Center?
Key Features of an Effective Social Media Contact Center
Best Practices for Managing a Social Media Contact Center
Make it Simple for Customers to Reach You with Meltwater & 8x8
Why Use Social Media for Customer Service?
There are a lot of reasons to embed social media into your customer service strategy, but the foremost is its popularity. If your customers have internet access, they’re almost guaranteed to be social media users. With so many people choosing social channels, it simply makes no sense to ignore them in favor of email and telephone calls.
Visibility boosts brand reputation
In fact, there’s a unique advantage to resolving customer problems on social: visibility. Because social discussions take place in public, it’s a very transparent place to demonstrate your commitment to excellent customer service. When you take care of a customer on social media, everybody can see it, and this helps boost your brand reputation.
Turn customers into brand advocates
It also enhances relationship building with your customers — if somebody sees a positive outcome after they engage with a company on social media, it improves their impression of the business and helps turn customers into brand advocates.
Cost-effective customer service
Even better, it’s a very cost-effective way of delivering customer care. Issues that can be rapidly resolved on social channels are deflected from your contact center’s phone lines and email inboxes, reducing the level of resources required to deliver good quality customer care.
Meet customers in their preferred channels
So it’s great for your business, but how does social media help customers? From their perspective, they get a faster response, on a channel that’s convenient to them. Nobody enjoys writing a complaint email, or dialing a call center, so if a consumer can get a fast resolution through a channel where they are already spending time, that’s a big win for them. This kind of positive, convenient resolution increases brand loyalty and customer retention.
What is a Social Media Contact Center?
Social media contact center definition: A social media contact center is an evolution of conventional contact centers, in which relevant messages and comments from social channels are processed through the same systems as traditional channels like phone calls and emails.
In practical terms this can mean technical integrations between contact center platforms like 8x8 and social media engagement tools like Meltwater’s social media management solution, enabling agents to both receive and respond to comments and DMs from their brand’s social channels.
In some cases, a social media contact center may exclusively handle social media communications, but often other channels will be handled alongside them. This means that whether customers contact the brand through a social channel, send an email, or make a call, their issue is taken care of by the same customer care team, so that a consistent level of service is delivered across all channels.
This consistency of customer care is one of the key benefits of integrating social media into a customer contact center. It also enables integrated analytics and reporting, so it’s easier to get a 360-degree view of how customer service is performing across all channels.
There’s another big advantage — by integrating social media with your help desk and CRM systems, you can build a more complete picture of your customers and their interactions with your organization.
Without social media integration, an agent dealing with a customer call wouldn’t be aware that they’d made multiple previous enquiries on X, Instagram, or Facebook, which creates a poorer customer experience. But armed with that knowledge, the agents can deliver far better outcomes.
Key Features of an Effective Social Media Contact Center
What makes a social media contact center? As we’ve discussed, the integration of social media data and engagement capabilities with existing customer service platforms is critical because the whole idea is to ensure no matter where a customer query or complaint comes from, it receives exactly the same level of care and attention.
So, whatever social engagement platform you’re using, it needs to be fully integrated into your help desk system so you can assist the customers via whichever channel is most convenient for them. As well as the mainstream social channels like Facebook, Instagram, X, YouTube and TikTok, don’t forget about lesser known channels which are growing in popularity, like Threads and Bluesky.
An effective social media contact center should be able to import queries from these channels into the help desk system, as well as enabling agents to respond to them from within the same system.
This integration should also include analytics and reporting capabilities, tracking metrics like response time, sentiment, resolution rate, and customer satisfaction. Measuring these things is critical for operational efficiency, enabling you to clearly understand the contact center’s performance so you can identify optimization opportunities.
Best Practices for Managing a Social Media Contact Center
Delivering excellent social media customer service requires strategic alignment, consistency, and customer-centric engagement. Here’s how to get it right:
1. Establish clear guidelines and response protocols
Create a comprehensive playbook that outlines how agents should handle different types of interactions (e.g. complaints, inquiries, compliments, crises). This should include:
- Response templates for common issues, and links to self-serve resources
- Escalation paths for sensitive or complex cases
- Timeframe expectations (e.g., reply within 1 hour)
- Platform-specific etiquette and tone-of-voice guidelines
Clear protocols empower agents to respond quickly and confidently, reducing errors and maintaining consistency.
2. Maintain a consistent brand voice and tone
Whether a customer interacts with your brand on Instagram, LinkedIn, or TikTok, the experience should feel familiar and on-brand, just as it does across all of your other non-social channels. Consistent CX is critical to building a strong brand.
- Core tone characteristics (e.g., friendly, professional, witty)
- Do's and don’ts for language, emojis, humor, and personalization
- Visual guidelines for image or video responses, if applicable
A unified voice strengthens brand trust and ensures that every touchpoint reflects your values.
3. Monitor social media channels proactively
While it’s vital to respond to comments and messages explicitly directed at your brand’s owned social channels, there are other things you should track on social, since not every relevant message will directly tag your brand.
- Direct messages and mentions
- Unbranded mentions and misspellings
- Relevant hashtags or trending topics
- Emerging issues or negative sentiment spikes
Set up real-time alerts and routing systems to assign tasks quickly to the right team. Proactive brand monitoring allows you to catch issues before they escalate and engage with customers even when they don’t tag you.
4. Encourage feedback and actively engage
Don’t just wait for complaints, invite input and amplify positive engagement. Consider:
- Asking for feedback after an issue is resolved
- Engaging in relevant conversations, even if they’re not support-related
- Amplifying positive mentions through reposts or shoutouts
Active engagement humanizes your brand, builds community, and provides valuable insight into customer needs.
5. Continuously evaluate and improve service strategies
Make analytics a core part of your operations. Track:
- Response and resolution times
- Customer satisfaction and sentiment trends
- Agent performance
- Frequently asked questions
Regularly review these insights to refine workflows, update training materials, and test new tools or automation. Constant optimization ensures your team evolves with customer expectations and social media trends.
Make it Simple for Customers to Reach You with Meltwater & 8x8
Meltwater’s social listening capabilities integrated with 8x8 allow agents to quickly source actionable cases from popular social media channels, as well as filter based on customized search criteria to save time and surface the most relevant and actionable social conversations.
“Social media has become a vital channel for customer engagement, yet many contact centers still struggle to support it effectively,” said Victor Belfor, Global Vice President, Business Development and Strategic Partnerships at 8x8, Inc. “We chose to partner with Meltwater because we believe it’s one of the most powerful social listening platforms in the market. Together, we’re helping organizations stay connected with their customers by delivering best-in-class technology from a single, trusted provider.”
By leveraging a social intelligence solution like Meltwater integrated with a contact center platform like 8x8, you can deliver faster, more comprehensive, and better customer care. What’s more, you’ll reduce costs by deflecting cases from more expensive channels (calls and emails), all while improving the overall quality of your brand’s CX.
