The truncated and pithy nature of Twitter can seem good for many things, but the kind of detailed interactions often required when delivering good customer service don’t instinctively seem among them.  Alas, new research from the University of Texas at Dallas suggests otherwise.

The research highlights how data has found that around two-thirds of consumers have used social media for customer service, with those companies using Twitter for such ends are seeing a 19% increase in customer satisfaction.

The researchers focused their attention on the Twitter accounts of the four largest telecommunications firms in the United States.  They found that the online customer service delivered by AT&T and Verizon was better than that of T-Mobile and Sprint.

“It’s clear more customers than ever use social media to seek help from businesses. We strive to determine an optimal strategy to manage digital customer care such as Twitter,” the researchers say.

Online customer service

The ability to successfully deal with customer queries was found to have a significant impact on not only customer sentiment but also the appearance of service quality given off by the firm.

“The top two firms, AT&T and Verizon, do better in terms of the effectiveness of care support over Sprint and T-Mobile,” the researchers explain. “Good digital care consists not merely of responding to tweets, but effort-intensive activity in which customer tweets need to be carefully examined and adequately addressed.”

The research also came to the somewhat natural conclusion that as consumers pay more for a product or service, they expect higher quality of care along with that, including on social media.

“This type of quality care may require designing some sort of ticket generation system that would detect the tweets that require follow up. Then put in place a good customer service team that would be able to resolve the issues. Simply sending out automated tweets is not sufficient for achieving good quality care,” the researchers explain.

If customer care is something organizations cherish, the findings underline the important role social media can play in fulfilling that ambition.  Given the commercial benefits derived from doing so, it would appear foolish not to place significant importance on making sure social media is on the frontline of your customer experience efforts.