Brandspeak: Is Twitter Ready to Support Brands’ Customer Service Needs?

Twitter is a sentiment-generating machine. It’s the place consumers can go to voice their opinions of brands–both positive and negative–and, in turn, brands can get a better hold on customer perceptions. But the content shared on this medium can have a long-lasting impact on how a brand is perceived by a wider audience.

Oftentimes, the sentiments people share on Twitter pertain to a brand’s customer experience. People will take to this public forum to bash a company for its poor customer service representatives or policies, causing others to pile on with critiques. Twitter wants to change this, going beyond a simple reviewing medium and becoming the go-to resource where brands can provide top notch customer service.

When it comes to customer service issues, today’s consumers refuse to get on the phone for resolution, with recent research revealing 65% prefer to solve their own customer service problems without a live agent. Twitter is the next platform that is making a big push into the self-service space. In fact, the social media giant recently launched a new feature that enables customers to share their location with virtual assistants on Direct Message. While personalization is crucial to a solid customer experience, this one technological capability isn’t enough to get brands excited about leveraging Twitter as an additional customer service platform. This feature is just one part of a bigger customer experience strategy.

New technologies will help Twitter create a holistic self-service platform for brands

Valuable customer service interactions don’t just happen. Shifting to meet new consumer preferences, many brands are implementing smart self-service tools like chatbots to provide quick, accurate answers—and ultimately creating happy, informed customers. To build a platform that brands and their customers will find useful, Twitter should look to implement similar capabilities that empower brands to offer effective support through virtual assistants. By utilizing innovative technologies to provide stronger customer support, Twitter will, in turn, help brands raise customer satisfaction and overall perception.

Creating fluid, two-way brand interactions

Customers’ biggest concern when communicating with automated tools is that they’re inefficient or inaccurate. But new technologies are changing how virtual assistants operate, allowing the ability to recognize situational context and customer intent, and ultimately improving the flow and accuracy of interactions.

Brands want to make their customers feel like their problems are heard, and virtual assistants are capable of getting to the root of the problem and delivering a contextually-relevant response. Take, for example, a customer who is looking for details on a brand’s annual sale. She might ask, “How long will the annual sale run?” and follow-up with, “What departments are included?” Without added technological capabilities, a chatbot would not understand the second question and respond with an error message. However, with advances in technologies including artificial intelligence (AI) and natural-language processing (NLP), a smart virtual assistant can recognize intent and keep context for continuous conversational experiences. For this specific situation, the chatbot can apply the context from the first question to understand the customer is looking for information on which departments are part of the sale. In this way, the experience replicates a human interaction, with intuitive and fluid support. Incorporating these capabilities into its Direct Message platform can help Twitter to become an effective customer support channel for brands, ensuring that customers are engaged and understood.

Pulling valuable insight from customer communications

Taking customer service a step further, Twitter should also consider integrating analysis capabilities for brands. If the platform already allows free customer expression and seamless interactions due to sophisticated applications of AI and NLP, among other technologies, they also have the opportunity to collect and share tons of new communications data. Inputting this information into an analytics system, brands can gain a better understanding of customers and how they are interacting with the brand on a specific touchpoint. Brands can even take the analysis a step further to examine how individual customers perceive the brand, using this insight to pivot their strategy to more efficiently meet customer expectations.

For Twitter, incorporating analytics tools into the backend of its platform will be a significant step in creating a successful support channel. This allows brands to become more agile in their social interactions, without taxing their customer service team. Armed with a better understanding of what their customers want, brands can work in real-time to adjust holes and roadblocks in their customer experience, showcasing how enthusiastic they are about meeting customer needs.

Encouraging brands to continuously update responses

Forrester research shows that nearly three-quarters (73%) of customers think valuing their time is the most important factor in providing good customer service. To ensure brands aren’t wasting their customers’ time, they should ensure the right information is available whenever it’s needed. This is where knowledge management systems are essential—the ability to quickly update responses means brands can relay the most pertinent updates in near real-time.

Knowledge management and content optimization tools can help brands pinpoint where their service might not be up-to-par. By taking in customer feedback, a virtual assistant can easily identify which specific questions are receiving irrelevant or unhelpful answers, and alert the brand to make changes before customers become frustrated, putting out the fire before it spreads. For Twitter, this kind of capability is crucial to survival. With customers able to tear a brand apart in a matter of seconds, every moment of a customer interaction on this channel is important and needs to be attended to. Implementing an intelligent knowledge management system ensures that brands are in control of the conversation on Twitter or any other platform.

Today’s brands currently see Twitter as the place to get a gauge on customer perception and overall sentiment—but the platform also offers a big opportunity for not just understanding, but improving these measurements. By incorporating technologies that allow virtual assistants to offer the most effective support, Twitter will drive brands to start seeing the social media channel as the next big support touchpoint they’ll need to include in their customer experience strategy.

Brad Epstein is SVP of Sales at Nanorep.

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