By Victoria Jameson | @VictoriaJameson

Social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, SnapChat, and Instagram give large companies the chance to reach out and connect with their customers beyond conventional customer service. But, new research has found that about 70% of negative feedback is ignored by companies online. Twitter has the chance to change that statistic by giving brands new resources to encourage customer support interactions on their platform.

This new customer service feature gives brands the option to reveal their response rate and hours of availability on their profile. Companies that offer customer support through Twitter will now have a special icon appear next to their name in searches as well.

Image: Mashable

Only 1% of customers actually use Twitter as their first stop of customer service issues, but overall 80% of customers use Twitter to air their grievances. This means that users taking to Twitter have already been unsatisfied with another means of customer service.So it’s obviously more important for brands to rectify these issues.

When brands use Twitter to deal with customer service complaints, they achieve two things. For starters, they publicly show that they are willing to fix a  problem. This gives the company more credibility and makes them appear more trustworthy to future customers or clients. The second thing that happens is that users see that the brand is genuine and attentive to the needs of their customers. Both of these things are attributes people look for when making a purchase, so brands would be smart to grow this reputation using Twitter’s new feature.

According to Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey, they have “always seen a huge appetite for customer service, whether that be praising brands or complaining about a particular service”. This negative and positive feedback system will give brands the chance to thank loyal customers and right the wrongs with unhappy ones.

Hopefully brands will use these new features to start paying more attention to feedback and use Twitter as a “social telephone” hotline to improve their customer service. It will be interesting to see over the next few months how much this update will improve the way brands interact with users.

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