Twitter overtakes email for fast, accurate customer service, says study

Twitter is coming of age as a customer service channel with more questions answered accurately through social media than email for the first time, according to a new study.

However, the Eptica Multichannel Customer Experience Study found that companies still failed to successfully respond to 59% of tweets and 61% of emails.

Channel (% questions successfully answered):

• Company websites (64%)
• Twitter (41%)
• Email (39%)
• Average across 3 channels (48%)

On a positive note, the study revealed that the speed of answering emails and tweets has improved dramatically. In 2014 it took an average of 61 hours and 39 minutes to get a response on email – this year this had been reduced by more than half, to 29 hours 27 minutes.

Twitter remained the fastest channel for customer service, with average response times dropping from 8 hours 37 minutes to 5 hours 27 minutes.

“Customers have never been more demanding, and many brands are responding by investing heavily in the customer experience,” said Julian Sammells, Sales Director UK & Ireland, Eptica.

“[We’ve] been researching the state of the UK customer experience annually since 2011, and this year we saw little overall improvement from 2014, with 52% of questions going unanswered and the performance of many brands worsening either overall or on specific channels. The chasm between the leaders and laggards is growing.”

The study evaluated 100 leading UK companies on their ability to provide answers to 10 routine questions via the web as well as their speed and accuracy when responding to email, Twitter and chat, repeating research carried out since 2011.