Twitter is a brand’s social saviour and worst nightmare all at the same time. Whilst it’s a wonderfully powerful tool to help build, promote and establish your business, this can all also be very quickly picked apart by unhappy customers broadcasting their negative experiences for all to see.

A consumer may email or call a company all day and night to no prevail, or if they do respond it’s a half-hearted, rushed email that doesn’t really resolve the issue. However, when consumers take to the Twitter world and send a public, direct tweet to the company in question, this company usually responds straight away whilst publicly providing an overly friendly, generous solution.
It’s all about image with social media, and consumers know how to utilise this.

With this in mind, let’s break down the 5 biggest nono’s of customer interaction on Twitter

Twitter B2C Failures

1 – ‘Copy and Paste’ Replies

On the whole, Mcdonald’s social marketing is very successful, and it’s great that they aim to reply to as many customers as possible. But when we scroll through their ‘Tweets and Replies’ tab – It’s the same 3 replies sent each time! This immediately devalues the response when the receiver has a glance at all of the brand’s interactions and see’s that their not a valued customer at all, but simply another opportunity to select that ‘Ctrl- P’ command.

2 – Spelling Errors
if you’re a professional hired to do this job, then you certainly shouldn’t be sending out grammatically flawed tweets. It really takes only a matter of seconds to skim back over your tweet before you broadcast it to every single one of your followers. As soon as you respond to a customer with a tweet that contains errors, you look a) Incompetent b) unprofessional c) disengaged. In short, it quickly makes your company appear amateur and your response rushed.

3 – Ignorance
As previously touched on, tweets that a brand sends to disgruntled customers are it’s opportunity to redeem itself (for everyone to see). So they can’t just be ‘nice’, they need to be overtly, over the top, bend over backwards nice.

Even a ‘please DM us’ response to get this angry customer off the public space would have been better than this reply from Hawke & Co. Not only have they lost a customer, they’ve completely damaged their brand image.
4 – Long Response Times
Some customer queries are urgent issues, so replying a several hours after the customer tweeted somewhat defeats the USP of Twitter customer service – the fast pace.

When consumers begin to view you as a company who don’t work to resolve queries promptly it becomes easy to sink into the shadows and lose your value.
5 – Generic Responses
It is understandable that brands who have hundreds if not thousands of tweets directed at them daily may have to regurgitate tweets every so often, but there are certain responses that every consumer can predict a mile off.

‘Oh no!…’

‘Eek..!’

‘So sorry about that…’

‘If you’d just pop this in a DM…’

‘If you’d contact our customer service team…’

The ‘light’ tone of these responses from Missguided’s help page is actually a really positive tool as it makes the frustrated consumer feel more relaxed, and as if they’re interacting with an understanding peer. However, the responses from this page are all the same.

Mixing up the responses even just by a fraction would have such a positive influence on the experience a consumer has when engaging with a brand, and would make them feel like much more of a valued customer, rather than another twitter handle for the brand to direct a blanket tweet to.

Those are our five biggest B2C pet hates. What are yours?