Twitter is on double time these days when it comes to rolling out new products and pressing ahead under new CEO Jack Dorsey — a strategy that will likely get a decent gust of air tomorrow during the company’s Flight developer conference. In the meantime, TechCrunch understands that one area where Twitter wants to do more in the future is in B2C business tools, and specifically customer service — in other words, how Twitter might position itself as a more useful platform for brands to interact with their users.
Customer service should not come as too much of a surprise for those who use Twitter: the company already has a decent amount of traffic from people who take to Twitter to complain about (or praise) brands, or ask questions of them.
And even without any specific customer service products, Tweets to B2C brands are growing at 50 percent each year. That is a stat that Twitter made public in August, when it actually announced its intentions to do more in customer care.
Twitter noted that two companies, Sprout Social and Oracle, have been working to develop solutions/integrations for businesses who wanted to use Twitter as a platform for interacting with customers. That announcement, penned by Chris Moody of Gnip (the big-data group Twitter acquired in 2014), said Oracle and Sprout would use new enterprise-level data functionality created by his Gnip team.
(The 50 percent stat, as it happens, came from a very enterprise-service move from Twitter: the company published an eye-watering 122-page white paper, with case studies from companies like Hilton, T-Mobile and Nokia showing how the social network was already being used for customer service initiatives.)
The August announcement seemed to get little notice when it came out, but from what we have heard, Twitter and its partners (and maybe others) have been working quietly on building the concept of customer care into more formal business tools.
So what might that entail? We have been told that areas that the company is exploring include developing stronger, real-time profiles between businesses and the individuals who interact with them, so that a customer rep can get a better sense of a customer’s tone and history with the company. (For example, to identify a persistent problem with a user’s phone connection, or maybe ID someone who simplay hates United Airlines or Uber, no matter what.)
Another involves creating a way to better prioritize requests for help that come through on Twitter. This might be based on responding to Tweets more quickly if they are getting more engagement — especially if they are negative — before they have a chance to go viral and damage a brand more.
(I have a problem with this one, personally: one great thing about Twitter is how it levels the playing field when it comes to making contact with people. Prioritizing based on engagement means that if you haven’t lucked out in inadvertently creating a viral sensation with your complaint Tweet, or if you have minimal followers who will see what you wrote, you may end up getting sent to the bottom of the heap and ignored.)
A third area is around the idea of structured conversations with customers. Often, the default progression of a Twitter conversation is to send someone to email or phone to communicate there after Twitter contact is made. The idea here would be to figure out how to both initiate but also complete the customer request without leaving Twitter’s platform but still staying secure and private.
Beyond what Twitter has announced publicly, executives connected to the company see customer service as a key part of Twitter’s future business.
Earlier this month, board member, former CEO and co-founder Ev Williams, speaking at a Re/code event, highlighted how Twitter’s role as a place for customer interactions goes back far in its history, but also how it’s a big business opportunity for the future.
“In 2008 or 2009, before we monetized at all, we saw 1 million people sign up to follow Starbucks… That is incredible commercial value,” he said. “We saw companies large and small, Twitter formed a connection between brands that didn’t really have a community channel. Now it’s a major source for customer service and marketing, there’s a robust business there… That part’s always been very powerful [and] as the utility and business grows that naturally grows with it.”
And you can see how this makes sense for the company.
For starters, it could help position Twitter as a larger and more sticky player in the area of business services, as a platform to facilitate all kinds of B2C interactions, from customer service through to marketing and advertising and maybe even selling products, too.
And as more brands use Twitter as a customer care channel, it makes Twitter more useful to regular consumers, who might visit more frequently as a result.
Come to complain, stay for the Vines and news updates. For a platform that has faced criticism for lacking mainstream appeal, customer service could be one weird trick to help Twitter’s engagement.
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