How Does Twitter Affect Retail Customer Experience?

The popularity of social media channels has grown exponentially over the last decade with over 200 billion tweets sent each year. With this in mind, customers use these channels as crucial touchpoints to engage with retailers on a real-time basis for customer service, with Twitter being one of the main platforms for this.

Recent Qudini research provided an analysis into the main customer complaint topics on or related to the search term “Bad store experience” on Twitter.

The results showed that 36% used social media to share a poor customer service experience, whilst also identifying the top two complaints shared on Twitter:

• 22.9% rude or inefficient staff
• 14.3% accounting for complaints

It was found that Twitter amplifies the impact of long queues in stores, creating massive headaches for retailers. If each negative post is seen by 200 people, 30% of whom would otherwise have visited the store in question, the lost revenue opportunity for an average store would amount to £451,000 a year. With over 290,000 retailers in the UK, £130.7 billion for UK retailers as a whole.

However, this is easily fixed with a virtual queuing system, which enables customers to join queues through store hosts, customer kiosks or their smartphones. Once entering into a queue, they then receive a queue position, an estimated wait-time and a weblink to track their progress, as well as real-time notifications.

To learn more about how social media is impacting retailer brand reputation and revenue and how you can you improve your in-store customer experience, download our white paper.