Here’s why top brands suck on social media: they ignore most tweets for help

Two new reports – one from cloud-based customer care software maker Freshdesk, and another from tech research firm Gartner – suggest that even the top global brands are doing an amazingly poor job of engaging with their customers on new age channels like social media and mobile.

Freshdesk looked at the top 100 brands of 2014, according to consultancy firm Interbrand, and analyzed how they engaged with customers on Twitter during the week leading up to the holidays: December 15 – 22. And this is what it found:

• The top 100 brands on average responded to just 22 percent of tweets directed at them. That means nearly 80 percent of tweets from customers, most of them asking for help, didn’t even get a response. And when they did respond, it took an average of six hours. Even dedicated customer support handles on Twitter took an average of three hours just to respond.

• These 100 brands each got 1,000 tweets a week on average, but only 37 of them have a dedicated handle to listen to customers. And these are global brands with a huge following.

• There were exceptions to this, but mostly in America – Samsung Support USA which goes by the handle @SamsungSupport responded to nearly all their tweets, as did @AskAmex for American Express, while @AdobeCare responded to a tweet in 26 minutes on average.

While Samsung USA is responsive, the American arm’s generic Twitter handle is confusing for customers outside the USA who keep tweeting to it only to be redirected to country-specific Samsung websites. Still, at least the tweets don’t go into a void, as they do for most of the top brands monitored by Freshdesk.

“When consumers reach out to their favorite brands on Twitter, they expect a response, especially if it’s a message asking for help or support,” says Jill Soley, vice president of marketing for Freshdesk. “Companies that fail to respond to these messages are missing an opportunity to connect with their consumers and build brand loyalty.”

Gartner echoes similar sentiments. Its new research report says weak mobile customer service is harming customer engagement. IT leaders will therefore need to innovate in engaging customers on all channels and have the right metrics for it.

In 2015, Gartner estimates that more than 50 of the 500 largest global businesses will introduce video-based chat for customer-facing interactions. This is set to double in three years.

At the same time, intelligent software will reduce the percentage of customer support interactions that require a human to solve. Nearly 60 percent of customer service interactions required the intervention of a human support agent in 2014. Gartner predicts that this will be cut nearly in half over the next two years. “Businesses need to focus on what key customer experiences would benefit from customer engagement with a human,” says Michael Maoz, vice president at Gartner.

“Marketing may fill the sales funnel, and the sales department can close a deal, yet it is the overall impression of the enterprise generated by the quality of customer service that differentiates one enterprise from another,” sums up Maoz in the Gartner report.