On Twitter, big brands like The Gap struggle to keep
up with customer service
3RD
APRIL 2012 by COURTNEY BOYD MYERS
To me, Twitter would seem
like a customer service rep’s dream — a platform that allows you to have
two-way interaction with your customers in realtime.
But in reality, Twitter has
presented a massive problem for the nation’s biggest brands. They can’t move
fast enough to keep up with their customers and the public nature of Twitter
makes it a very intimidating playing field for both customer service
departments and social media marketers.
Recently, the folks at Conversocial,
a platform that enables brands to manage interactions and increase engagement with customers in social media, completed a study
entitled “Top US Clothing Retailers on their Customer Service Response Times on
Twitter” (based on their revenue listing in 2010).
Over the last week of
January and into February, Conversocial tracked over 8,000 @mentions of 10
major brands including TJ Max, Limited Brands, Foot Locker, Dress Barn,
Abercrombie and Fitch and a few others (listed below). While each retailer
was broadcasting to its followers (#s below), how were they meeting their
“Twitter obligations”?
We asked Conversocial
CEO Joshua
March what exactly
a brand’s responsibility is on Twitter. “To respond,” he answered
without blinking an eye. “So many companies will blast their followers with
marketing messages and ignore the customers who are trying to speak to them.
Twitter was invented as a communication channel. It’s not a billboard.”
So how did the brands perform? Over the week that Conversocial tracked
the @mentions of ten brands, only 13% of users’ complaints got a response
on Twitter. When brands did respond, very few were keeping up with the fast
pace and there was a strong impression that retailers in the sample failed
to take customer service seriously. Even the top performer, American
Eagle, who responded to nearly 70% of complaints, was still making basic
social media mistakes such as not monitoring its feed over the weekend.
It turns out the brands’
response times on Twitter resulted in a vast range from a competitive 20
minutes to over 50 hours.
“Today, what’s particularly important about speedy responses for fashion
retailers is that a mass amount of tweets are sent by mobile phones so
customers can be in the store tweeting. It’s easier to tweet rather than having
to go to a website or look up a phone number. This shows how important it is to
be on the ball. Responding to someone 10 hours after the fact can translate to
serious missed opportunities,” says March.
I guess a response that’s 10
hours late is better than none at all? According to Conversocial, 50% of
the Top US Clothing Retailers didn’t bother to answer customer service
complaints on Twitter. You may be thinking, well it’s probably quite a lot
of moaning on Twitter, and that might not be worth responding to, right? Wrong.
Turns out, 48% of customer service issues were direct queries; whereas
only 9% were negative comments that criticized companies without
really looking for help.
“We were quite surprised
about this,” says March. “We thought, okay they’ve got to be doing something…
but they’re literally blasting out marketing messages and not responding to
anything else? We were pretty shocked about that.”
One of the retailers that
failed the social media exam was The Gap. Conversocial reports that customers
posted a sequence of @mentions discussing damaged clothing and other issues,
negatively impacting Gap’s brand among its base. While all of these posts
mentioned Gap’s Twitter profile, they all went unanswered by Gap’s official
account.
“A lot of
these companies actually have social media staff dedicated to the
Twitter feed. But that’s not really enough when it comes to customer service,”
explains March. “A vast number of companies are failing because there’s no
way one or two social media marketers can keep up with thousands of incoming
messages.” In addition, the people running Twitter and Facebook accounts
for brands aren’t often trained to deal with real customer service issues like
refunds and exchanges, meanwhile customer service representatives aren’t
trained to handle social media technologies.
“We’re working with hundreds
of companies to help them solve this problem,” says March. “There’s a more
established model coming up, which is the ‘social media customer service team’.
Big brands need to have 50-60 customer service staff trained to use social
media, as well as systems to monitor actions and keep up with the volume.”
While having followers and
getting hundreds of retweets is great, brands should start paying attention to
the quality of their engagement. Companies like Conversocial are helping to
provide the tools to do this– other similar companies include Sprout Social and Twenty Feet. The bottom line is it’s not about quantityanymore
— we’ve confirmed that there are a lot of people on the Internet and they’re
making a lot of noise. It’s now more than ever about the quality of
our myriad experiences online.
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