Twitter’s New Customer Service Features Make It Easier To Send Private Messages And Feedback

If you’re the kind of person who likes to talk to businesses on Twitter, the company is rolling out some new options to improve those interactions.

First, businesses can now can add a “send a private message” button to their tweets. So you might start a conversation with a business via public tweets, but at a certain point they can ask you to move to direct messaging with just a single tap or click. Second, Twitter is adding an option for businesses to privately ask you for feedback after a customer service interaction.

Now, I can imagine that this would be appealing to companies who’d prefer to discuss customer issues and complaints privately, rather than seeing them broadcast for everyone to see. However, Twitter identifies some other advantages to these new features.

After all, if you’re trying to get something fixed or get a refund or whatever, you may need to share your personal information at some point, which you probably want to do privately. In addition, businesses may need a more quantifiable way to measure the effectiveness of their customer service, so Twitter is allowing them to survey customer through the standard Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) formats.

Twitter is integrating these new features with existing customer service tools thanks to partnerships with Conversocial, Hootsuite, Lithium, Salesforce, Spredfast, Sprinklr and Sprout Social. The Direct Message deep linking feature should be able available to all businesses today, and it’s already being used by brands like Delta, Starbucks and ClassPass. Meanwhile, the Customer Feedback feature will be rolling out over the next few weeks.