Best Social Media Management Tools for Customer Support

The simple act of posting can be a journey, with content moderation, platform rules, and even user abuse being a common phenomenon online. When you choose to use social media management tools, you should be aiming to reduce your stress in managing your different social media channels.

But when these software tools themselves start bugging out, you’ll need to be sure that they have the proper support to save you from even more headaches moving forward. That’s why we’ve studied all the different social media management tools to identify which ones have the most robust support teams available.

What Makes the Best Social Media Management Tool for Support

Social media management tools come packaged with many different functionalities that can help you create a more organized workflow within your social media profiles. These can range from the ability to cross-post across different platforms, schedule posts in advance, create new audiences based on interactions, and much more. All of this is to say that social media management tools can create a much more in-depth interaction between brands and their audience.

That’s why the best social media management tools know how to properly deal with their users and lead them back to a smoother experience whenever things go wrong. When dealing with different platforms, errors can occur where posts go out of sync, content disputes occur, and even the dreaded locking out of an account. It’s at these moments you’ll need expert hands to guide you back to complete functionality. Below are the features that we’ve identified to be the defining factor of the social media management platforms that have the best support available.

Response Time

Have you ever raised a support request and received a response after a week? Often you have solved the issue by that time or it has become a serious issue for you. Because there is nothing as annoying as receiving a response late, we have evaluated each provider by their response time according to a custom set of questions. Respectively a fast response results in a higher score for the response time and, thus, also for the overall support score.

Response Quality

Timely answers are one thing, but in the end, it comes down to whether the response is also helpful to you or if it doesn’t answer your question. In our test, we asked the same questions to all providers of social media management tools, ranging from easy to fairly hard questions. We rated each response based on the level of helpfulness from 1 to 10 and combined the scores into one for the response quality of each provider.

Live Chat

One of the most important aspects of any good social media management tool in terms of support is its ability to deliver fast help when needed. A handy feature that has been more and more popular in recent years is the “live chat widget” - a tool that allows you to instantly connect with a service person at your convenience.

The availability of this kind of support will likely vary from software provider to software provider. Most times, there will be a stated time period in which live agents are available, but the best software providers will offer this service to their users 24/7. Note that the live chat feature is different from the common chatbot, an AI service function that aims to direct users to appropriate help articles. Live chat connects you with an actual person to help you along the troubleshooting process.

Email

When live chat isn’t available, either due to it not being integrated within a platform or simply when chat hours aren’t 24/7, the best recourse for any good social media management software provider is to have a robust email service line. This doesn’t mean just having an email available to contact, but the company being active in managing this email as well. The worst thing is for a user to send a troubleshooting email request and to have to wait several weeks just to get a reply.

Customer Reviews

Another useful metric we’ve identified that can be indicative of the kind of support you’ll likely receive from any given social media management platform is what the users themselves have to say. After all, nothing speaks louder than the actual user feedback on the platform. If a lot of people can verify the quality of support, it’s likely to the case, which is why we included reviews as part of our assessment.

Phone

Last but certainly, a great way to make contact is a social media management platform’s ability to be reached via phone. While this may be a customer service method from the pre-internet era, phone services are still some of the most reliable ways to get instant assistance from an expert. If a social media management tool has all of the above as well as a dedicated phone line, it’s a sign that the platform is making strides in ensuring that they are reachable at all times.

10 Best Social Media Management Tools for Support

How to Choose a Social Media Management Tool with Great Support

While having a social media management tool is already a big step forward in creating a better and more consistent online presence, the importance of its software support capabilities will largely depend on your own expertise in the subject matter. If you have been in social media management for a while, you’ll likely be familiar with the different ins and outs of what it takes to maintain a consistent brand online. This means that while support will be helpful, it will be on the more technical aspects, such as issues or complex strategic executions.

If you aren’t a subject just yet, then having a reliable support team will be very useful to you. But since the support is just a small part of the whole picture we first recommend going after your other main priorities in choosing a social media management tool. If you then still stand between a few providers, you can check who would serve you best in terms of support. To help you make a more profound decision, feel free to check our overall Best Picks to get a market overview across the criteria we looked at and make use of our Comparison Tool and Finder Tool.