BT and EE named the slowest brands on Twitter

BT and EE are among some of the worst-performing Twitter accounts when it comes to responding to customers, according to new research from BDRC – while Lloyds Bank came out on top.

Taking into account a brand’s social media response rate, speed and quality of tweet, BDRC’s mystery shopping service revealed that financial services and supermarkets were the top-performing sectors, led by Lloyds, NatWest, Morrisons, Barclays, Sainsbury’s and HSBC.

In terms of response rate, only five companies – Waitrose, NatWest, Barclays, Asda and Morrisons – responded to every tweet, while BT and EE lay at the bottom of the table (below) with response rates of 63% and 73%, respectively.

Lloyds Bank and SW Trains had the fastest response time with an average of one hour five minutes, followed by Waitrose and Hilton at 1:21, HSBC (1:33) and NatWest (1:42).

EE, again, performed worst, with an average response time of almost 20 hours – a full eight hours after the next nearest player, O2, at 11:42 and some way behind the average time which was just shy of six hours.

Sky and Virgin Media performed best in terms of quality of response – scoring 89 and 82 out of 100, respectively – followed by Barclays and Sainsbury’s (both at 76) and Tesco (73).

“With so many people able to connect to social media 24/7 through their smartphone, tweeting a question or complaint is becoming second nature,” said Tim Barber, director at BDRC.

“As people increasingly use Twitter to contact brands hoping for a quick response, it’s important that brands benchmark their performance to see what service consumers are experiencing elsewhere.

“Twitter offers a great platform to improve customer engagement levels and deliver excellent brand service, but as we’ve seen, some of Britain’s biggest brands are falling behind.”