CRM trends: Social media beats email for customer service

UK brands answer less than half of customer queries received on Facebook and Twitter, according to new research.

The study, from Eptica, indicates that espite its importance to consumers, email is falling behind social media when it comes to customer service, with UK brands answering just 38% of emailed questions, according to a new study.


Twitter (48% success rate) and Facebook (44%) are both more accurate and faster at delivering responses, although a lack of consistency between channels is undermining the overall customer experience. Overall, across email, the web and Twitter, brands were only able to correctly answer 51% of questions that were put to them.

Other key findings were:

· Email is less available and slower than in 2015. 64% of companies (10% fewer than in 2015) made email available to non-customers and the average time taken to answer emails increased by nearly 5 hours, to 34 hours 15 minutes.

· Company websites answered an average of 66% of queries, up 2% since 2015, but with a large range between sectors and brands.

· Average response times on Twitter improved from 5 hours 27 minutes to 4 hours 14 minutes, well ahead of Facebook (8 hours 37 minutes).

· Brands are increasingly uni-channel. 18% of companies only answered accurately on a single channel from email, Twitter, chat, and Facebook, while nearly a quarter (22%) failed to respond successfully on any channel at all.

Source: http://www.netimperative.com/2016/03/crm-trends-social-media-beats-email-for-customer-service/