The microblogging platform Twitter is unique on its own. Despite being dwarfed by the likes of Facebook, it still wants to be there when users are wanting it. One of the means, is by making itself a social customer service, in a social media way.
Twitter has been a place where many users are engaging with businesses, and according to a research conducted by Social Bakers in 2015, more than 80 percent of customer service requests are happening on Twitter.
So even if Twitter has struggled to significantly grow its user base, customer service interactions on the platform have grown by 2.5 times over the last two years.
For this reason, Twitter Introduces a Customer Service Display options.
With the feature, "businesses can now indicate that they provide support, which adds that information to suggestions when people search for a business, @mention a business in a Tweet, or find a business in Direct Messages," explained Product Manager Travis Lull on September 15th, 2016.
So this is essentially an extension to the feature where businesses can add a deep link to their tweets that automatically displays a call-to-action button, and the Customer Feedback that enables people to privately share their opinions with a business after a service interaction.
Twitter is famous for being the real-time network where gimmicks are seen as the last things people would expect. For this reason, messages tend to have a faster response rate on Twitter than most other platforms.
The Customer Service Display option is an answer to those users that are sick of waiting on hold for phone support. And by having the feature prominently displayed, Twitter can deliver brands' customer service support in front of their followers.
Shown in the image, brands can now be able to indicate that their profile provides support. When they do this, there will be a large prominent "Message" button shown on their profile, and a badge that indicates when they're available.
The "provides support" indicator appears when Twitter users are searching for a brand's account. This can distinguish which of a brand's accounts is used for promotion, and which is dedicated to customer support.
For brands that want to use the feature, they need to tick the box to indicate that their profile is a support account. Then they can specify the times and timezone to inform when they're available.
While the feature can be beneficial to those that seeking ways for contacting a brand, the feature isn't Twitter's main strategic focus. The platform has removed its 140-character limit from DMs in 2015, and introduced new tools to help brands. And at its core, Twitter is also simplifying itself to boost live-streams.
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But Twitter is already great in real-time engagement, and this is why the feature could come in handy. Furthermore, the added feature is like an answer to Facebook's Messenger business options and its bots, and as a way to compete with Facebook's response time and hours for brands in Facebook Pages.
Since engagement is the key for a social media to flourish, Twitter that is struggling for engagements and new users, is seen to leverage what it has to its advantage.