Improved Customer Service Via Twitter

18-02-2016Tags: Social

The micro-blogging platform has developed two new features designed to improve customer support and to obtain customer feedback.

According to McKinsey & Company, 30% of social media users prefer customer service via social media over traditional call centres. Over the past few years, it's become the norm for consumers to connect with brands on Twitter for queries and concerns. With this in mind, it's no surprise that Twitter has advanced its tools to help brands improve their customer service.

On Wednesday 17 February, Twitter announced two new features to help companies improve their social media customer service and to gather feedback following these interactions.

Direct Message prompt

Firstly, it'll be easier to move the conversation out of the public eye. Once rolled out, it'll be possible to add a call-to-action link inviting the customer to private, direct messaging conversation. See the "Send a private message" link in the example.

"Larger than email"

According to Twitter, some businesses receive 80% of their social media customer service queries happen on micro-blogging platform. As part of the announcement, Joshua March - Founder & CEO of Conversocial, "Twitter is now a larger customer service channel than email for many leading companies, and they've responded by building major social care operations to handle the volume".

In-app customer satisfaction survey

Secondly, it'll be easier to gauge customer satisfaction following an interaction. Users will be able to privately submit feedback via survey questions within Twitter, as shown below, in either Net Promoter Score (NPS) or Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) formats.

Net Promoter Score

The Net Promoter Score is based upon the fundamental perspective that customers can be divided into three categories: Promoters, Passives and Detractors. By asking "how likely is it that you would recommend [company name] to a friend, family member or colleague", customers are divided by their response on a 0-10 scale.

Detractors (0-6) are unhappy customers who can damage a brand and share their negative experiences with others via word of mouth.

Passives (7-8) are satisfied but not enthusiastic customers who have little brand loyalty. Whilst they wouldn't share negative word of mouth, they're unlikely to promote a company.

Promoters (9-10) are brand ambassadors who are often loyal, repeat customers that recommend a company to others.

"Seamless experience for users"

In a statement regarding the new features, Patience Yi - VP of Strategic Alliances at Hootsuite - said, "with an increasing number of social customer service interactions happening on Twitter, providing a seamless experience for users is critical for businesses. By making it easier to collect customer feedback, we're confident this will add tremendous value to both companies and customers."

Improve your social media customer service

Whether you want to increase your customer service efforts via Twitter or decrease your reliance on the telephone for customer queries, get in touch with us today.