Twitter Publishes Free Customer Service Playbook For Brands

These days, a lot of people choose social media as their avenue to post complaints about poor customer service. However, at the same time, many dealerships aren’t doing a good job of responding to these complaints, especially on Twitter, which is where the majority of people post these types of comments.

According to data from social media analytics company Socialbakers, brands answered less than 30 percent of the 7 million questions that were asked of them on Twitter in the second quarter of 2015. On Facebook, brands are doing much better, answering 76 percent of the 1.5 million questions posted on their Facebook Pages in the same period.

Facebook is obviously well aware of its advantage in this regard, and the social media giant is offering new tools for Pages that allow administrators to respond to comments privately. Now, Twitter is making its own moves. Today, the company released a free 122-page “customer service playbook,” which Twitter says will help businesses to improve their customer service efficiency by taking advantage of the quick and personal nature of the medium.

“The introduction of the 1-800 number changed the way brands approached customer service,” said 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.”

According to Socialbakers, 80 percent of customer service requests on social are happening on Twitter, and there has been a 2.5 times increase in the number of Tweets to brands and their customer service usernames over the past two years.

Whether customer service is being handled on social media, over the phone, or in person, it’s important for dealerships to understand that making a customer happy is cheaper in the long run than letting an issue go unresolved. Now, with social media, the potential for negative customer service experiences to be spread around to others is much higher than it’s ever been in the past, so paying careful attention to ensuring that consumers are happy with a dealership’s service is more important now than ever before.

“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 one-sixth of what they’re seeing in call centers,” said Moody. “And companies that developed social care capabilities improved year-over-year revenue per contact by 18.8 percent over companies without social customer service, according to a study by the Aberdeen group.”

Twitter explains that the 122-page customer service playbook goes into “everything from the high-level opportunity to the key steps and best practices in creating a world class social care organization.”

Interested dealerships can view Twitter’s playbook for free here.