By Nikita Geldenhuys

Twitter has long been used by consumers to voice their concerns or complaints about a product or service. Brands often try to move these conversations to a more private space, by asking the aggrieved users to DM them. 

International brands like Samsung, Xbox, and Nike have picked up on this trend and put the social network to use as a customer support channel, says Bryan Haines, content marketer and partner at Storyteller Media, in a post on the Buffer blog. Recognising the application of its platform for this purpose, Twitter has improved its offering with the DM button for websites. 

“Direct Messages are the private side of Twitter, and the message button makes it easy to start a private conversation with you,” Jeff Lesser, senior product marketing manager at Twitter, wrote on the Twitter Developers website, when he announced the feature on 24 August. “It works best when your account settings allow you to receive Direct Messages from anyone, whether or not they follow you.”

The company has now also announced a feature that will show users which companies’ Twitter accounts are able to provide them with support.

Is the DM button for websites a useful feature, and more importantly, will South African audiences use it?

Customer services goes social

Bianca Quinn-Diavastos, MD of 25AM, believes this will depend on how responsive brands are on Twitter. “The success of the direct message button will greatly rely on the company’s ability to reply within a reasonable amount of time to their clients. If the customer feels that their voice was not heard, they will revert to tweeting about it.”

She notes social media-based customer services can, in many ways, “be an answer to a lot of customers' prayers”. Well-managed brand accounts on social media can, for instance, help get answers to customers in a timely manner. 

“Customers have also learnt that a complaint on social media has a lot of power. If you wrote an email or phoned, the response is sometimes less effective and the outcome not as desirable. I am, of course, not saying this is true in all cases, but it is often true. The landscape for customer service centres are rapidly changing as a result.”

Gavin Coetzee, digital monitoring researcher at Newsclip Media Monitoring, echoes this view. “Twitter’s very structure and design lent itself perfectly to an audience that wanted to quickly connect with brands and organisations, while receiving real-time responses. As Twitter has grown and businesses have committed more time and resources to social media, this functionality has developed to the point that many major companies now have social-first customer relationship management (CRM) teams responsible for managing client interactions and enquiries.”

A direct link between brand and customer

Coetzee notes that the new DM button for websites plays into this new digital CRM functionality. In his opinion, the feature strikes the right balance between direct, private communication with clients, and the convenience of social media interaction.

The button also takes the work out of the often cumbersome task of finding a company’s customer support contact details, says Quinn-Diavastos. “Customer don’t have to struggle to find the ‘Contact Us’ information or to go onto social media to search for the brands,” she explains.

“Living in the age of ‘now’ has made it very hard for businesses to cater to their customer’s needs. [Customers] don’t want to look too hard or too long for a way to ask their question or voice their concern. The DM button helps businesses to address the need for answering questions ‘right now’ more easily.”

Coetzee adds that companies communicating with customers directly and regularly will find this functionality useful. “Whether using the DM option for customer retention, lead generation, or direct communication, there is a range of potential options available to businesses.”

Amidst fears that Twitter’s dominant place in the social media world is on the decline, the company is evolving with its users to find new applications for its micro-blogging platform. The network has and continues to play a role in changing the way businesses serve their customers. 

How are you using Twitter to serve your customers? Tell us in the comments below.