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Twitter Gets Serious About Helping Businesses With Customer Service

We’ve been writing a lot about social media-based customer service lately. There have been numerous studies on the subject coming out in recent months, and both Facebook and Twitter themselves h...
Twitter Gets Serious About Helping Businesses With Customer Service
Written by Chris Crum
  • We’ve been writing a lot about social media-based customer service lately. There have been numerous studies on the subject coming out in recent months, and both Facebook and Twitter themselves have been bringing it up a lot.

    This week alone, Facebook launched some new features for Pages to better respond to and engage with customers, and Twitter put out an infographic about ways to get better at doing so. You can get a look at both of those here.

    On Thursday, Twitter announced the Twitter for Customer Service Playbook.

    “The introduction of the 1-800 number changed the way brands approached customer service,” says Chris Moody, Vice President of Twitter Data Strategy. “In the nearly 50 years since, customer service hasn’t changed much, until now. We’re in the early days of the next revolution — customer service on Twitter.”

    As the company notes, 80% of customer service requests on social are happening on Twitter, according to Socialbakers. It says it has also seen a 2.5X increase in the number of tweets to brands and their customer service usernames over the past two years.

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    “Not only are customers turning to Twitter for help, Twitter is also significantly more efficient and effective for companies who are seeing a cost per resolution on Twitter that’s ⅙ of what they’re seeing in call centers,” says Moody. “And companies that developed social care capabilities improved year-over-year revenue per contact by 18.8% over companies without social customer service, according to a study by the Aberdeen group.”

    Twitter says the actual “playbook” goes into “everything from the high-level opportunity to the key steps and best practices in creating a world class social care organization.”

    The playbook is free. You can find it here.

    In a related announcement, Twitter announced that it has partnered with Sprout Social on a new suite of tools to help brands provide better customer service. This concerns a pilot of programmatic access to impression and engagements data, which is aimed at helping brands prioritize conversations, get insights, and measure audience. Oracle will release a related solution soon, Twitter says.

    Image via Garrett Heath, Flickr Creative Commons

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