Twitter, Inc. has added two new tools to help businesses provide improved customer service using its popular microblogging site.
With the first, businesses can now easily transform a public Twitter conversation into a private, direct message-based one with a simple URL-based icon, while the second allows them to easily collect customer feedback through a third-party service provider such as Hootsuite.
“Care teams have told us they love the open-ended feedback they get from people via tweets and direct messages, but they also need the ability to survey customers in a structured way to better measure and improve their service experience,” Twitter product manager Ian Cairns wrote in a blog post announcing the new services.
The direct messaging tool was released today, while the customer feedback feature is expected to roll out over the next few weeks.
To use the direct messaging tool, businesses first need to set up their Twitter accounts to receive direct messages from anyone (you can do this by clicking your profile picture, selecting settings, then security and privacy), after which they can insert the following link in their tweet, which then turns into a 22-character “Send a private message” icon:
https://twitter.com/messages/compose?recipient_id={your account’s numeric user ID}
As for the customer feedback feature, businesses can use one of two industry-standard formats – Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) – to create a fixed questionnaire which can be inserted into a message using a variety of third-party service providers and software, including Conversocial, Lithium, Salesforce, Spredfast, Sprinklr, Sprout Social, and Sparkcentral, in addition to Hootsuite.
Additional help regarding both the customer feedback and private conversation features can be found at the Twitter for Business website.