Twitter is a channel that has been steadily growing in importance for brands and marketers. 99 of the top 100 brands, according to Interbrand’s list of the best global brands have an official presence on Twitter. Simply Measured recently released a report on how these brands are using Twitter for customer service. In addition to the existing brand handle, several brands have a separate handle that deals only with the concerns of customers. As stated in the study, the added presence of a dedicated customer service handle allows brands the flexibility of responding to complaints, questions and issues without compromising their brand voice.
The report, based on data up till March 2013, is an update on the earlier December 2012 report. 30% of the brands considered have a dedicated customer service handle, up from 23% in the previous report.
The report takes a detailed look at the dedicated handles of these 30 brands. Some of the key findings and takeaways are shared here:
- 19% of the top brands send more than 10 tweets a day from the customer service handle, 8% send more than 50 tweets a day, and 7% send over 100 tweets each day. These seven are Samsung, Nike, Ford, Microsoft, American Express, Nokia and UPS.
- Not all tweets get responses though, the average response rate for those 30 dedicated handles is 42%, with the highest average response rate for a brand being 75%. Only five brands maintain an average response rate over 60%.
- The average response time for a customer service query is 5.1 hours. The fastest average response time for a brand is 0.7 hours, or 42 minutes, which for Twitter, is still very slow. A study by market research firm The Social Habit, showed the expected response times of consumers who use social media for customer service, and 42% expect responses within an hour.
- This highlights the importance of real-time responding, and it is evident that a brand needs to have the requisite resources to be able to handle the volume of queries. Even more important, however, is being able to rank the incoming tweets by prominence, and deciding which to take on priority. The study states the example of Dell’s immediate response to Louis Tomlinson, member of popular band One Direction. Even though Dell’s average response time is 11 hours, they responded to this high-profile tweet in less than 15 minutes.
- Not only was the tweet by Louis Tomlinson widely noticed by fans, it was retweeted over 13,500 times and favourited by 15,000 people. Dell’s response also received more than 1,100 retweets and nearly 700 favourites, signifying that consumers take customer service on Twitter seriously. Indian brands would do well to keep this in mind, as evidenced by the crisis that Audi India faced, when they failed to respond in time to the tweets by Vishal Gondal in November last year.
There are quite a few brands in India as well that have dedicated customer service handles, such as @Airtel_Presence and @HDFCBank_Cares. It would be beneficial to them to see the global response time and volume standards and evaluate where they stand, and take learnings from them as well. Simply Measured’s entire report can be seen here.