This article looks at the problems with using Twitter as a banking tool. Many banks are now utilizing social media in order to expand their customer base but using it for customer service can lead to some very negative effects.
People are getting more and more hyped up on the social media craze each day. It was even recently announced that Facebook is now the number one use of the internet worldwide. So what are financial institutions doing to keep up with the latest trends in social media? Many banks are now starting to use Twitter as a customer service tool, but it could be causing problems.
A recent study has shown that banks are struggling with the dilemma of security over ease of use for customers. They want to be able to provide customers with the ability to ask customer service questions through integrated social networking sites like Twitter. But a problem is arising because of the fact that Twitter isn’t designed as a customer service tool, it was designed as a social networking tool. Privacy and security is limited with websites like Twitter, which could be leaving customers vulnerable if they accidentally or unwittingly share their financial information through Twitter.
The researchers looked at Twitter questions asked by customers to accounts like Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Citigroup. They also looked at whether the customer’s question was resolved on Twitter or if it was resolved by redirecting the customer to another method of communication such as a call center.
The researchers also made sure they were examining the data from the period of September twentieth through November tenth of last year. This period of time is of particular importance because of the emergence of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Those dates signify a period of particular anger and distrust on the part of many Americans against big banks. During this time is also when Bank of America had announced its plans to move forward with their five dollar fee and the impromptu Bank Transfer Day had been scheduled for November fifth. The volume of questions submitted to big banks via Twitter had actually tripled during this near two month period.
The researchers found that the banks analyzed did not resolve customer questions in the best way possible for the customer via Twitter. Without revealing which banks did best or worst, one of the three previously mentioned banks only resolved thirty six percent of their complaints via Twitter, another bank resolved eleven percent, and the last bank only resolved three percent. Many of the complaints were likely resolved elsewhere, like through a call center, but were not resolved via Twitter.
The researchers found that most customers were dissatisfied with using Twitter to resolve their customer service questions. Most of the time the banks responded with scripted answers full of information that likely could be just as easily found on the bank’s website. The scripted texts often instructed customers to perform further tasks and go through extra steps to have their problem resolved, effectively causing Twitter to be an unnecessary extra step.
Many of the banks have set up a specific username just for customer service questions that is different from the bank’s regular username. The report also found that only one bank decided to respond to customer service queries that were sent to the wrong username. The report eventually advised that banks should make a greater effort to answer any Twitter questions they may receive if it is possible to do so without compromising customer security. Doing so results in greater overall customer satisfaction with banks. The point of being able to use Twitter as a method of solving customer service issues is to make it a time saver for customers, not a time waster.
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