Finally this week, the company announced new tools intended to improve interactions between businesses and users on
"Twitter is live, public, and conversational — and the best place for businesses and customers to connect," Ian Cairns, a Twitter product manager, said in a blog post. "These businesses generate impressive results — not only are their customers more satisfied, but they also see a cost per resolution [via Twitter] that is ⅙ the cost of a call center interaction. And this leads to increased brand loyalty and sales."
The private message link is an important feature for Twitter, as a customer service conversations often need to move to become private to allow the user to share personal information.
"Care is the new face of marketing," Elizabeth Closmore, head of marketing and partnerships at social media advertising startup Sprinklr, said in a blog post. "Twitter has proven it’s an amazing place for brands to talk to and ultimately build relationships with their customers. Twitter’s new customer service features are a testament to the fact that brands need to quickly and effectively engage on the customer’s terms... and at scale."
Twitter said companies have been requesting ways to gather more measurable feedback from users. Twitter's survey tool will use two industry standard question formats, Net Promoter ScoreSM and Customer Satisfaction. Twitter said companies such as Hootsuite, Lithium, Salesforce, Spredfast, Sprinklr, Conversocial, Sprout Social and Sparkcentral are making these tools available in their existing customer service workflows.
Although Twitter has built a sizable advertising business, its quarterly revenue growth has been slowing for nearly two years. And earlier this month, the company reported a net loss in its fourth quarterly earnings. Customer service could be an important way for Twitter to boost revenue and eventually monetize direct messaging. Dorsey recently emphasized his focus on customer service during the company's third quarterly earnings conference call in October.
"We've always seen a huge appetite for customer service, whether that be praising brands or complaining about a particular service, where a brand can actually turn around a conversation completely," Dorsey said on the call. "We think there's a lot of potential to make this a whole lot easier."