Infographic: How quickly do big brands respond to customers on Twitter?
Not so quickly, it turns out. A company tweeted customer service
questions and complaints at 14 major companies. Guess which ones
respond—and which ones didn’t.
By Michael Sebastian | Posted: January 28, 2013
Retailers are earning a lousy reputation for not responding to tweets.
One
recent study found that a mere 29 percent of retailers with Twitter accounts respond to customer questions and complaints.
An experiment by
Software Advice on the
Customer Service Investigator blog
underscores this apparent indifference. The company conducted what it
called “The Great Customer Service Race,” in which four people tweeted
to 14 major brands over 26 days.
The point of all that tweeting was to gauge how long it took these
brands to respond to customer questions and complaints, as well as their
overall response rate.
Each company received one tweet a weekday. Tweets sent during the first
and third weeks included the @ symbol. For the second and fourth weeks,
the company’s name was mention in tweets without the @ symbol.
According to Ashley Verrill, managing editor of
Customer Service Investigator, the questions asked in the tweets represented five categories:
• Urgent, or I need help right this second;
• Positive (“thank you!”);
• Negative;
• A question from their FAQ page;
• Technical, or needs more than one interaction to solve.
Many of the companies—including Apple, Starbucks, and Wal-Mart—didn’t
respond at all. Bank of America, meanwhile, scored the highest response
rate;
MasterCard Pepsi clocked the fastest response time (
34 19 minutes).
This infographic lays out the results:
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