‘Vodafone UK best at Twitter customer service’
Vodafone UK has the highest response rate to customer service queries via Twitter than any other brand in the world on the site, according to a report.
Analytics company Socialbakers’ “Socially Devoted Q4” report marked Vodafone UK’s response score ahead of other high profile brands such as Nike and American Airlines (see top 10 below). It ranked brands based on the number of questions answered minus the number unanswered.
A Vodafone UK spokesman says its success can be tracked back to its strategy to primarily use Twitter as a customer service rather than marketing medium. The company’s social customer service team is about a dozen strong, covering Twitter, Facebook and Vodafone’s own and third party forums using a series of dashboards.
Jan Rezab, Socialbakers CEO, says Vodafone UK is particularly well set up for social customer service because it applied itself to the format early on by structuring up its internal trained team to handle queries.
Rezab says: “Brands should apply themselves, it’s more authentic when it’s a trained employee of the organisation answering your queries. Companies have to be ready – and it’s actually cheaper to reply to questions via Twitter than it is a phone call.”
Overall, about 32 per cent of the questions asked on Twitter by consumers are answered by brands – up from 31 per cent in the previous quarter.
The average response time to customer questions asked on Twitter increased from 5.1 hours in the third quarter to 6 hour, suggesting responding on time is becoming more challenging as consumers realise the power they wield when questioning brands on social media and have begun to look to digital rather than traditional customer service channels.