Twitter Launches Customer Support Prompt via DMs, Customer Feedback Tools

Twitter announced this morning a new customer service tool, prompting customers to engage with companies via direct messages. They also launched a way for customers to offer feedback after such an interaction. Product manager Ian Cairns explained in a blog post: Twitter is live, public, and conversational — and the best place for businesses and customers to connect. In fact, with millions of customer service-related interactions happening every month on the platform, many of our advertisers tell us that over 80% of their inbound social customer service requests happen on Twitter. These businesses generate impressive results — not only are their customers more satisfied, but they also see a cost per resolution that is ⅙ the cost of a call center interaction. And this leads to increased brand loyalty and sales: recent research shows that when a customer Tweets a question or complaint to an airline and receives a response, they’re willing to pay on average $9 more for their next purchase from that airline. The first major tool announced today by Twitter allows brands to take a public interaction to the private direct messaging service. Businesses can now add a deep link to Tweets that displays a call-to-action button, prompting users to send a direct message. To follow up and gauge how well the interaction went, Twitter allows users to privately share their opinions on the discussion, Cairns noted: Care teams have told us they love the open-ended feedback they get from users via Tweets and Direct Messages, but they also need the ability to survey customers in a structured way to better measure and improve their service experience. Customer Feedback makes it easy for customers to share their feedback with a business after a customer service conversation. With this feature, businesses will be able to use two industry standard question formats: Net Promoter ScoreSM (NPS®) and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT). Twitter launched these features today among its Twitter Official Partners, whose clients can use these tools to better engage with customers. As customer service on Twitter has grown 2.5x over the past two years, these tools become vital in allowing brands to better talk with customers via Twitter. Davy Kestens, chief executive officer of Sparkcentral, feels this is a great move: Twitter's initiative to enhance social customer care aligns with Sparkcentral’s mission to create open and real-time communication between consumers and brands. We built out functionality that enables our clients to easily collect and analyze customer feedback to better understand how their customers view and value their products and services. Ultimately, we want to make it easy for our clients (who believe customer service is a competitive differentiator) to use this data to enhance interactions and deliver on their brand promise. Joshua March, founder and CEO of Conversocial, is also excited about these new tools: Twitter is now a larger service channel than email for many leading companies, and they’ve responded by building major social care operations to handle the volume. Being able to measure the success of these operations through a measure like CSAT is a hugely important next step, both to measure the quality of care and to compare with other channels. As a Twitter Official Partner, we’re excited to help bring these measurements into the native user experience—innovations like these help our clients including Google, Sprint, Hyatt, Hertz, Air New Zealand and more deliver great service over Twitter. Patience Yi, vp of strategic alliances for Hootsuite, weighed in: We’re excited to work closely with Twitter on integrating the new Twitter Customer Feedback feature into the Hootsuite customer service solution. 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 easy to collect customer feedback, we’re confident this will add tremendous value to both brands and customers. Rahul Sachdev, Sprinklr's vp of customer care & community, blogged about what this means for brands: These updates have been designed to make it much easier for brands to deliver personalized, measurable experiences to customers – all in real time. For a customer, it means a quick and convenient way to get in touch with companies. You simply Tweet at the brand for help, and they take care of the rest. There’s no waiting on the phone, no going back and forth via email, no hassle. For a brand, it means streamlining the entire customer service experience. Customer service agents can proactively seek customers in need, provide personalized interactions (based on contextual data), and measure the impact of their efforts. Virginia Miracle, chief customer officer of Spredfast: Social has become a primary channel for customer service. We've heard loud and clear from brand and media customers alike the desire to seamlessly interact with their audiences, while also being able to measure team performance. Twitter's latest announcement means our customers will now be able to more easily take conversations from public to private, as well as measure crucial success metrics like their Net Promoter Score. We couldn't be more pleased with the actionable insights this will offer our customers and look forward to continuing to partner with Twitter on more innovations in social customer care. Readers: How often do you use Twitter for customer service?

Social Pro Daily

Twitter Launches Customer Support Prompt via DMs, Customer Feedback Tools

Twitter announced this morning a new customer service tool, prompting customers to engage with companies via direct messages. They also launched a way for customers to offer feedback after such an interaction.

Justin Lafferty

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Justin Lafferty