Wayne Huang is a researcher at Twitter. His role entails proving the value of the service through data, analytics, and experiments. He works on connecting the product teams and sales teams at Twitter by creating research strategies and implementing ad effectiveness measurement plans.

One of Huang’s findings that businesses need to take note of is that being better at customer service on Twitter, even if it simply means acknowledging a customer’s tweet, directly correlates with these customers spending more money.

If that doesn’t get your attention, I don’t know what will. And believe me, this is something a lot of businesses aren’t paying nearly enough attention to.

Just look at how bad these response times were across industries in Q4:

Huang recently appeared on the Focus on Customer service podcast talking about his findings that people pay more when responses are timely. SMT recaps some of his comments:

You can listen to the whole thing here:

So good Twitter customer service also means good word-of-mouth.

A month ago, Twitter introduced a couple new features that should help businesses with their customer service efforts.

One of the new tools is a new way to start a direct message. A business can now add a deep link to their tweets that automatically displays a call-to-action button, enabling a customer to send the business a direct message. This is even more helpful considering that Twitter recently expanded the character limit of DMs to 10,000. Twitter is also now letting users record and share videos in Direct Messages. This could probably help a great deal in customer service situations that require visual aid.

The other new customer service tool is Customer Feedback, which lets people privately share their opinions with a business after a service interaction.

According to Twitter, millions of customer service-related interactions happen on the platform every month and many advertisers report that over 80% of their inbound social media customer service requests happen on Twitter.

Image via Wikimedia Commons