As many opportunities as social media platforms have given businesses to connect with customers, many just aren’t doing it well to say the least. According to recent research from Socialbakers, the U.S. is near the bottom of the list for customer care on both Twitter and Facebook. For Twitter, we ranked 33 out of 37 countries.

Twitter has released some of its own research and is giving brands four ways to “build customer service relationships”. In a blog post this week, Twitter research manager Meghann Elrhoul wrote:

To understand how satisfied people feel with customer service interactions on Twitter, we surveyed 14,040 Twitter users who follow or interacted with brands’ customer service Twitter accounts in the past six months. We asked about their latest customer service experience in terms of: friendliness, personalization, responsiveness, resolution, satisfaction and recommendation.

Our resulting research surfaced four key best practices for brands who want to shift from simply handling customer service to nurturing customer service relationships and experiences. Check out our infographic below for the top data points and read on for our recommendations as well as examples of brands getting customer service right on Twitter.

Here’s the infographic looking at the findings and offering tips on building customer service relationships:

What it boils down to, according to Twitter, is being friendly (empathizing with consumers and offering help), being personal (using real names and signing every reply), being responsive (responding in less than an hour), and being accessible (following up to ensure problems have been resolved).

Sounds like a winning formula to me. Take a look at Twitter’s post about this for more insight into how to do all of this effectively.

Images via Socialbakers, Twitter