Transforming customer service on Twitter with a new playbook and new ecosystem solutions

Thursday, 6 August 2015

Today we’re making it easier for brands to provide better customer service on Twitter. We’re publishing our new Twitter for Customer Service Playbook and announcing that Sprout Social is the first to use new data and functionality to create an improved and transformative customer service solution for brands. Additionally, Oracle intends to release their upgradable customer service solution in the near future.

The next customer service revolution
The introduction of the 1-800 number changed the way brands approached customer service. 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.

Customers are rapidly turning to Twitter to resolve their issues. According to Social Bakers, more than 80% of customer service requests on social are happening on Twitter. And during the past two years, we’ve seen a 2.5X increase in the number of Tweets to brands and their customer service usernames.

Transforming customer service on Twitter with a new playbook and new ecosystem solutions

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 ⅙ of what they’re seeing in call centers. And companies that developed social care capabilities improved year-over-year revenue per contact by 18.8% over companies without social customer service, according to a study by the Aberdeen group.

Some of the world’s largest brands are realizing the benefits of using Twitter to provide customer service, including Oracle customer General Motors:

General Motors continues to strive for excellence with our customer care capabilities, providing new ways to understand and engage with our customers like never before—and it’s a winning strategy for both our customers and our business. We interact daily with our customers on Twitter, allowing for a quicker, more personal engagement, enabling General Motors to put its customers at the center of everything we do.

Rebecca Harris @RebeccaHarrisDrGlobal Head of Social Center of Expertise at General Motors

The Twitter for Customer Service Playbook
To help companies better realize this opportunity, we’re publishing our new guide to customer service on Twitter. The Twitter for Customer Service Playbook details everything from the high-level opportunity to the key steps and best practices in creating a world class social care organization. It’s full of real world examples from companies like Hilton (@HiltonSuggests), Best Buy (@BestBuySupport), Comcast (@ComcastCares), Spotify (@SpotifyCares), T-Mobile (@TMobileHelp) and Microsoft (@LumiaHelp).

Download your free copy of the playbook now via Box (no registration required).

As we cover in the playbook, customer service on Twitter has many benefits, as well as some challenges. Users expect quick responses, personal and friendly interactions and timely resolutions.

New data to improve partner solutions
To meet these needs, we are working with the leaders in social care to help them develop improved solutions for companies to elevate their customer service. @SproutSocial and @Oracle are taking advantage of a new suite of Twitter data products and functionality to build next generation customer service solutions that:

  • Provide rich context about customers: Customer service agents will be able to provide better service through contextual insights about a customer.
  • Create moments of delight: Move beyond resolving customer requests for service to identifying users who are publicly sharing moments and creating a delightful experience for them.
  • Understand customer needs: Deepen understanding of customers’ needs by enabling analysis of Tweets along with internal company data.
  • Measure impact: By seeing metrics for impressions and engagements, brands can measure their audience, get insights from their interactions and prioritize conversations that need attention.

These solutions are piloting a new suite of data products and functionality. This includes programmatic access to impression and engagement metrics to enable them to build new measurement solutions. It also includes improved access to the full archive of public Tweets back to 2006 to help them build solutions that can instantly provide rich context about customers.

Transform your company
According to a McKinsey study, companies that improve their customer experience from average to ‘wow’ can see a 30-50% improvement in key measures such as likelihood to renew, likelihood to recommend and likelihood to buy another product. We’ve provided these solutions with the data they need to help companies find users publicly sharing moments where brands can respond and create a delightful experience that ‘wows’ their customers.

By going beyond the expected and proactively creating these ‘wow’ moments, companies have the rare chance to build brand goodwill and transform their business by changing the way consumers perceive their brand.

What’s next?
This is just the beginning. Keep an eye on this space in the coming months for updates on more products, more resources and more capabilities.

Check out more details on Sprout Social and Oracle’s blog posts.