Twitter Embraces Social Customer Service with New Automated Features

Twitter has bolstered its customer service offering to enable businesses to add a layer of automation to their customer interactions.

The move, says Twitter, is designed to ‘create better conversational experiences’ between brands and their customers.

Businesses can now create welcome messages that will be displayed when a customer starts a direct message. Users will also have the option of choosing what their query relates to – from the status of an order to technical support.

The update follows on from a roll-out of another customer service addition last month, when Twitter enabled businesses to clearly display on their profile if they offer a dedicated customer service channel, as well as the optimal times when those accounts are active.

On its company blog, product manager Ian Cairns said: “These features are designed to help businesses create rich, responsive, full-service experiences that directly advance the work of customer service teams and open up new possibilities for how people engage with businesses on Twitter.”

“When quick replies and welcome messages are used together, businesses can reduce wait times and educate people on the best ways to interact with them. For example, they can enable faster resolutions by helping customers more easily provide information to solve problems before an agent sees the first message.”

If your business provides support in Direct Messages you will be able to add a welcome message from today by going to the support settings page of the Twitter dashboard.

The past year has seen other advancements in social customer service, with Facebook launching their own customer service bot on their Messenger platform in April, and adding functionality in September allowing users to make payments.