The Great Social Customer Service Race [INFOGRAPHIC]

How do big brands measure up on social media?

“The Great Social Customer Service Race” was created to evaluate how efficiently the nation’s top brands provide consumer support on Twitter. We wanted to learn what kinds of tweets received a response, and how quickly.

To conduct the race, four Software Advice employees used their personal Twitter accounts to send customer service tweets to 14 leading consumer brands in seven industries. Each company received one tweet per weekday for four consecutive weeks.

During the first and third weeks, our employee participants used the brand’s Twitter name with an @ symbol. Using the @ triggers a notification to the account owner that they’ve been mentioned in a tweet. In the second and fourth weeks of the race, only the brand name was used.

The questions fell into five categories:

• Urgent, or I need help right this second
• Positive (“thank you!”)
• Negative
• A question from their FAQ page
• Technical, or needs more than one interaction to solve

The evaluations in the infographic are based on the time it took the brands to respond and the percent of total tweets that received a reply.

About Our Guest Blogger, Ashley Verrill Ashley Verrill is a market analyst with Software Advice. She has spent the last six years reporting and writing business news and strategy features. Her work has appeared in myriad publications including Inc., Upstart Business Journal, the Austin Business Journal and the North Bay Business Journal. Before joining Software Advice in 2012, she worked in sales management and advertising. She is a University of Texas graduate with a bachelor’s degree in journalism.