3 Ways Twitter’s New DM Will Impact Your Social Customer Service Team

Did you hear? Twitter’s new DM policy enables Handle owners the option to receive Direct Messages from anyone. Even those people who don’t follow you. Scared? Well you shouldn’t be.

So what does this mean for your customer service team?

This new feature will help enable more efficient customer service experiences. It solves the whole “Hi, can you please follow me back so I can DM you?” scenario, making it a win/win situation for both the customers and brands/companies. But it also creates new issues you should prepare for.

Here are three gotchas your social customer service team needs to consider with Twitter’s new DM policy so you don’t miss a step serving customers.

1. Is your social customer service platform equipped to consolidate all messages, both public and private?

It helps you and other customer service agents to see the entire conversation history on one, clean screen – even if the messages switch back from public to private (DMs). Why? Because then you get a better idea of who the customer is and what issues they have dealt with in the past. Nothing is more frustrating for your customers to ask about the same issue multiple times and being treated like it’s the first time.

2. How will this change how you respond to users?

Some customer service teams prioritize public tweets based on the number of followers of the users. With an increased number of incoming private messages from appreciated customers, you’ll need additional factors to determine your response strategy. Having information about the customer such as recent concerns, purchases and VIP status will help you prioritize inbound messages holistically.

Another thing to consider is a policy around reaching out to customers proactively over Twitter’s direct message. Just make sure you’ve empowered your agents to handle this new responsibility.

3. Be ready prepared for volume – a different kind of volume.

People will be more compelled to share private info over direct messages – especially those that are Twitter shy and prefer to keep their profiles private. But with more private information being shared comes the expectation of a quicker response.

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Twitter’s New DM policy will affect how your business conducts customer service. How do you think your customers will react to direct messages?