It is becoming more and more important for brands to have a strong customer support strategy on Twitter – whatever the industry. And airlines seem to be getting it right.
New York, NY-based customer experience management platform Sprinklr partnered with Twitter to analyse almost half a billion tweets to 1,228 brand handles during 2020 to discover how brands are doing on providing customer service on Twitter.
Its From AM to DM: Twitter customer care in a 24/7 world report released today identifies best practices across 11 different industries to identify the top performing brands for customer support on Twitter.
The analysis shows a 15% increase in customer care enquiries on Twitter for March to June 2020 during the coronavirus pandemic, compared with the volume received December 2019–February 2020.
Its analysis showed that compared to most handles, the top brands in customer care in Twitter respond to eight times as many tweets and receive ten times more mentions than other brands. They respond three times faster and have six times more followers.
Only one in five brands take ownership of customer problems, but nearly three in five retail brands excel in this best practice despite high volumes of tweets. Top retail handles get 50% more incoming tweets than top handles in other industries
Some customer tweets are more urgent than others – especially in time-sensitive industries. Industries such as airlines, logistics, and telecom companies are fastest responding to half of incoming tweets in four hours or less.
In other industries like retail and apparel response times are less important taking around 6 or 7 hours to respond to many of their incoming tweets – three times faster than most brands in these industries.
The report shows that brands that use dedicated customer care handles are four times more likely to excel at Twitter customer care. Four in five (80%) of the top-performing telecom handles are dedicated customer care handles
Top care teams post service hours in their Twitter bio to let customers when to expect a response.
However it is not all bad news for the tech industry. Of the 80 tech brands analyzed, over 30% were among the top-performing care handles in the overall dataset.
Almost half of tech brands also use a dedicated handle for care on Twitter. Amongst the top-performing tech handles, almost 9 in 10 are in the top tier for this best practice. However only 12% took the time to build a relationship by engaging customers.
Joe Rice, Lead Product Solutions Sales Manager, Twitter said: “Brands have the opportunity to connect directly with their customers, but there’s no singular answer for how brands should execute customer care on Twitter. This report paints a helpful picture of current industry trends and which best practices add value for customers.”
So how can brands improve? The report suggests going the extra mile for customers to make them feel part of the brand, respond quickly to requests to make it easy for customers to get help, and create a relationship between the customer and the brand.
It is so easy to suggest these improvements – but it will take a lot of work putting these into practice for many brands.
