Days after Twitter accidentally revealed its “muted words” feature and removed it; the company has come up with another new feature to help businesses connect with consumers even more conveniently on its platform.
To start with, businesses that are using Twitter for promotional activities can now set up welcome messages. These messages will enable the customer and the business to hit it off together, without the customer having to hunt for an appropriate first message.
The other feature addition — and the rather more interesting one — is “Quick Replies”. This option — as it suggests — helps customers to choose from a variety of, frequently asked questions to businesses and get automated responses to the most common ones. Customers can choose from a variety of questions already mentioned on the platform. This ranges from customers being able to track an order, get more information about a product, or talk directly to an agent.
Quick Replies will go a long way towards saving the customer’s time and will also make Twitter more user friendly. This would be helpful for those who might not know what kind of questions can be asked and answered on Twitter.
For instance, if a customer wants to track their order, they can get a quick answer by an automated response via that business’s twitter account, without having to resort to talking to an actual person.
For businesses, an automated reply will also serve to ensure customer satisfaction to a large extent. According to Twitter, customers who receive responses on their tweets to businesses, are willing to spend 3 to 20 percent more on a product – human connection certainly goes a long way.
Despite all that’s been surrounding the company, Twitter is certainly working hard to make its platform more intuitive for users and more attractive for businesses. What I personally fear though, is the fact that these additions are coming pretty late when you compare the roll-out timeline of similar features on Facebook. And while Facebook isn’t offering a direct feature of that sort, its messenger bots army can sure as hell do much more than that.
It will be interesting to see where Twitter heads. It did report a better than expected Q3 and continues to bring in increased revenues despite a rather stagnant user base. However, hate speech, celebrity trolling and a lot of other similar issues plague the platform as it continues to fail, in removing accounts spreading such content. On top of that, Twitter has a lot of administrative issues to deal with,quintessential of them being leaving of senior folks. It will be a closely watched next one year for Twitter.
