Social media is increasingly a primary channel through which customers elect to communicate with brands, and brands are taking the channels more seriously. In the last year, there has been a 143% improvement in brand response rates on Facebook alone.
To help create industry benchmarks, Social Bakers started a new reporting mechanism in 2012 to monitor how well brands were engaging their customers, called Socially Devoted. Its interactive tool reveals the leading industries, and the most responsive companies within each industry, worldwide. Among the performance metrics considered are the volume of consumers responded to, and how long the response took. The most recent report confirms that Airlines, Telcos and Financial institutions currently lead the verticals, with KLM storming into a lead:
It will come as little surprise then, that developing the trend further, another industry pioneer O2, who themselves have noticed a five fold increase in customer interaction on digital channels in the last two years alone, are going a step further. They’re soon to launch a new service on Twitter that enables users to check account information including data, minutes and texts, just by tweeting. Their lauded handling of a social media crisis helped define how brands operate on social channels – and perhaps this new service will encourage a similar ethos in access to services…
