Twitter study: Media companies show poor customer service
To coincide with Twitter’s 10 year anniversary last month, research consultancy BDRC Continental has published findings from its mystery shopping report revealing how well brands deal with tweeted customer queries.
Almost 400 brands had their response rate, speed, and quality of response measured to understand and compare how some of the UK’s leading companies manage customer queries via Twitter.
The results are, in the main, bad news for media companies.
TV platforms and services came 21st out of 32 sectors for overall performance, with Netflix scoring zero – a result of not replying to a single tweet to their main UK feed.
There was, however, wide variation between brands, with Virgin Media scoring 58 overall, more than double the score of Freeview, with just 25.
The survey, dubbed ‘Twystery’, looked in detail at the quality of companies’ responses on Twitter, graded on a range of measures including whether the question asked was actually answered, the provision of additional information, and the tone.
The best performing sectors were banks, credit card companies, rail and retail – with the likes of Nationwide (credit cards), Aviva, Great Western Railway and Co-op banking scoring highest.
“It’s surprising that TV platforms and services didn’t perform better,” said Tim Barber, director at BDRC Continental, who leads the mystery shopping programme.
“They are usually very adept at using social media to promote their content. Perhaps most striking is the difference in scores between fierce rivals Amazon and Netflix (44 vs. 0). This was caused primarily by the proportion of queries that were actually answered.
“We tweeted their main UK accounts (they do also have dedicated customer support accounts – if you know where to look), and yet Netflix didn’t reply to a single query.”
In contrast to Netflix, Amazon responded to two-thirds (64%), with Sky and YouView leading the field, replying to every single query.
“Although Amazon may not have responded the most often, when they did, they did so quickly,” Barber said. “They took an average of 1 hour 16 minutes to respond, compared to 25 hours and 7 minutes for Talk Talk TV.”
Other key findings:
– Virgin Media had the highest quality score for the content of its tweets
– Freeview had the lowest quality score
– The fastest single response (in less than a minute) was from Sky
– The slowest took over four days
– No tweets answered: Directholidays.co.uk, Klipsch Audio, Netflix (official UK account), Nokia, PayPal (official UK account), Puma, Slazenger and Stansted Airport.
“Twitter has been around for over a decade so companies have had plenty of time to learn how to use it effectively to handle customer queries and complaints. We believe that a decade on, responding promptly should be basic housekeeping for consumer-facing brands,” Barber added.
“But to meet customers’ increasingly high expectations of the service they receive, it’s no longer enough just to respond (and to respond quickly) to every tweet: the response must be useful, provide the information needed, and address the question or complaint in an appropriate manner.
“It’s particularly important as it’s all done in public – questions and responses can be seen by anyone.”
Over 9,000 tweets were sent by mystery shoppers to 395 brands in 32 market sectors. Each brand was sent 25 different tweets by 25 different users. All brands in each sector were sent the same 25 queries to allow us to benchmark the responses.