Rate Limiting and Customer Service

Do rate limits matter? Twitter for example (as at publication date) limits any posting entity to 1000 tweets per day and 250 direct messages per day with even lower in hour limits.  For the average Twitter user these rates are absolutely fine; even a heavily tweeting account is typically sending less than 50 updates a day (based on the percentage of my own followers behaviour as a benchmark). I follow just over 1000 people (at time of publication) and of these only 37 of the people I follow tweet more than 50 times a day; anyway, I can tell for these prolific tweeters that they are using BOTS and Automation;

Of these 3.7% of the persona’s that I follow only 7 tweet more than 100 times a day. Only 2 tweet more than 200 times a day and only 1 tweets more than 300 times a day. As I tend not to follow Brands, but follow personalities that may themselves represent brands my own metrics are somewhat irrelevant.  Incedentally, I tweet 5.5 times a day.But what about a large brand, say @JetBlue with 1.7 Million followers?  What answer are you expecting?

I can almost guarantee that this figure surprises you! With 1.7 Million Followers did you expect more engagement? @JetBlue is quick to state on their own Twitter profile that they do not handle Customer Service enquiries on this account.  But, have a look at the next graphic.  What do you see?  Do you see the same thing I do?

I see an account that is engaging in customer service enquiries!  Now, at 8.6 Tweets a day they are just beginning their process of engagement in Customer Services; despite the Brands best efforts to encourage complainants to use a dedicated customer service area online at jetblue.com/speakup or by phoning in.  They don’t appear to be honouring their own account profile do they?  So, what are they doing?  They are training their audience!

Okay, so I think I’ve made the beginning of my point. Even extremely succesful online Brands like @JetBlue with a huge following don’t yet have to worry about being restricted on their outbound Tweets by Twitter because it is very early in their engagement journey.  Why? Because the 1000 tweets a day, a maximum of about 300 in any hour and 250 Direct Messages in any 24 hours isn’t going to be broken at their current engagement rates.  If they continue to teach their customers that complaints @jetblue are responded to I will argue that they are going to have a very big problem, very soon!

What about brands that are already directly engaged in Customer Service on Twitter? I’ll start the investigation with @Vodacom111 ; a dedicated and extremely hard working a talented team of social-engagers directly within Customer Services in Vodacom South Africa.

This is already 10 times as much engagement as we see from @JetBlue. These figures are averages of course.  In @JetBlue’s case, if we were to suffer, say, another Volcanic Ash Cloud, or in @Vodacom111 an incident like the infamous Blackberry Messenger Outage of September 2011 they will easily hit the glass ceiling of maximum Tweets per day.  On two occasions now, even with very small Social Media customer services teams I have seen them be rate limited.  On both those occasions it was just because of a traffic spike.

I’ll have a quick look at another Social Media in Customer Operations engager in the form of the Orange UK dedicated Customer Services Twitter account @orangehelpers, who are just as hard working and dedicated as Vodacom111;

This is again a high level of average daily engagement, and does not reflect spikes in engagement caused by an issue on the network as in our Blackberry Messenger failure.  With a little bit of Google searching it appears the current busiest outbound Tweeter is @FoxNews;

The problem with these figures is that they are averages over the entire lifetime of the account, and most accounts ramp-up over a period.  Using simple tools provided by Twitter Stats it is possible to extract detailed records of actual tweets per day going back about 6 months.  Let’s compare the actual current figures with the averages we’ve just explored.

@Jetblue – 6 month Tweet Rates

Does anyone else notice the spike in interactions around Hurricane IRENE in late August?  That alone clearly tripled the amount of outbound tweets from the main Brand account, despite the fact it isn’t used for Customer Service; apparently!

@Vodacom111 – 6 Month Tweet Rates

Even though Vodacom111 has got 7800 followers, roughly 218 times less than the following of @Jetblue they are already at the high watermark of around 130 tweets per day based on my adjudication of their stats. This is what I expect from a customer services team that are engaging with a few people on the front line. @Jetblue is still doing their 50 a day or so. But, as you saw earlier even @JetBlue is beginning to engage in Customer Service on their main account. Also, I see several spikes at about 250 tweets a day from the Vodacom111 team.  They are though still a very small and dedicated team of social engagers who aren’t yet fully engaged but they will be soon.  What happens when Vodacom customers begin to learn to engage?

@orangehelpers – 6 Month Tweet Rates

With @Orangehelpers we see a very similar engagement curve to @vodacom111. A steady increase in engagement and clear customer service spikes.  I can also see them hitting in excess of 350 tweets in a day based on a very specific event in early December 2011.  My guess is it was a traffic spike induced by a 15% price increase to all customers.  In early October we can see over a weeks worth of spike.  Anyone like to guess what that issue was?  Yes, it is the Blackberry Messenger failure.

@TMobileUKHelp – 6 Month Twitter Rates

The T-Mobile Customer Service team increased the size of their engagement team.  Anyone like to guess when?  We see the same traffic spike around the 15th of October due to the Blackberry Messenger failure. Another big spike on or around the 25th November. I wonder if that had anything to do with the new DROID launch?  This again, is a small, yet dedicated team of engagers.

What does this all point too?

My line of thought should now be obvious!  If I am a Brand and my Marketing Department is engaged in a social media strategy then I may tweet prolifically; perhaps using Automation and Bots to take content coming from the core of online and broadcasting it on Twitter. I suspect that this is how most INFORMATION streams find their way into Twitter.

But, what about Customer Service?  In some of the accounts that I have mentioned in this post Anana has deployed several key elements of their existing customer service capability.  The volume of customer interactions handled by these solutions in traditional channels like the “telephone” are mind-boggling.  We are talking about numbers in excess of 1 Billion customer service interactions a year.  The Interactive Voice Response system alone handles over 125,000 interactions a day! Don’t those numbers begin to cause a concern?  If our digital natives are keen to use social platforms to access Customer Service we need our social platforms to enable an according amount of interactions! Right?

If, as an industry, we are training our social media audience to engage in Customer Service enquiries on these platforms we have to acknowledge, understand and appreciate the underlying maximums!

Twitter allows 1000 tweets a day to be sent to it by an account.  That is absolutely adequate for the Marketing Department, who are extremely unlikely to be sending out more than 50 updates a day.  What about a dedicated customer services team using Twitter?  They are deliberately training their customers to engage in social channels.  Not because of it being marketed that way, but in pure realisation that the customers are approaching the main brand accounts with Customer Service enquiries.  The very fact that most organisations create tailored Customer Service Twitter handles is proof alone.  The blessing, right now, is that the amount of engagement when compared with regular customer service channels like “the telephone” are incredibly tiny!

I am extremely quick to point out to our customers when we take them on a social engagement in customer services journey that they recognise these limits and that they plan an engagement strategy that honours them.  It would be a complete failure, for example, for the customer services team to come online at 7am in the morning, and immediately start responding to the Tweets that come in overnight.  If they do this with abandon, they may actually very quickly become rate-limited by Twitter having been at work for the first hour!  Yes, you have 1000 tweets a day, but a maximum of about 300 in any hour!  Whoa!  That means, a Customer Services team on Twitter has to recognise not only the daily 24 hour limits, but within each hour too?  Yes, indeed!

Some of our customers adopted early strategies to ask the Tweeting customer to Follow them, and the Direct Message their account details so that the customer service team can look into the issue.  This WILL NOT SCALE! Of course, it cannot! At 250 direct messages a day the customer services team will have their hands tied!

This is a remarkably difficult situation to alleviate. For sure, I think Brands will put extremely heavy pressure on Twitter to allow rate limited accounts to be ‘whitelisted’. Without this happening there is absolutely no way that any brand can effectively engage in social media as a vehicle for customer service.  For now, they are doing it and getting away with it simply because we are all still training our customers to engage and the amount of traffic per day is typically much lower than the rate limits, and secondly, when we deploy technology, like Genesys Social Engagement into Customer Services we tune the solution so that we are only bringing in Tweets that are passing tests in 4 specific area’s;

• Actionable
• Classification
• Sentiment
• Social Influence

Actionability allows us to determine if there’s anything that can be done about the Tweet itself.  If the Tweet says “The Sky is Blue” then the actionability is LOW.  Classification is a technology form where we determine what the Tweet is about. By looking for particular keywords we can isolate the product or service being mentioned, and route it to the right team or skill.  We can also determine the sentiment in a range from NEGATIVE through NEUTRAL to POSITIVE.  Lastly, the social influence of the Tweeting party can be measured.  With these 4 factors at hand when a Tweet is offered to the customer services routing strategy we can begin the important task of establishing the business rules that will apply to each Tweet!

• Is it important enough for us to worry about?
• Did the complainant reach a big audience?
• If they reach a big audience what is their authority?
• What is the sentiment of the tweet like?
• What is the tweet about?
• Can we do anything about the Tweet?

By very carefully mixing these key factors we can define a Genesys Routing Strategy that ensures that the 1000 tweets a day budget, and the maximum of 300 an hour, and the 250 direct messages a day are spent carefully!

What is the impact of these limits on the Customer Experience?

My view is that customers will learn very quickly who gets engagement and who doesn’t! If the enterprise says that the @klout social influence score must be above 40 to qualify to receive a treatment how long do you think it will take for the customers to realise this?  If customers learn that the more profanity and charging they put into their sentiment the more likely it is they get a response what will be the impact?  The big dilemna is the customers themselves are not rate limited on the inbound side.

Let’s use @jetblue again for a use-case scenario – we have another Volcanic Ash Cloud sweep its way over North America, effectively grounding the airline. @jetblue has a fleet of 120 A320 aircraft (plus 70 or so smaller ones). Each one of these aircraft can house up to 120 passengers on typical loading.  That would be an immediately affected flying audience of 120×120 people.  That is 14,400 immediately affected passengers. Let’s assume that only 10% of these passengers are users of Twitter ( a low number, I know – its actually closer to 40% in America, but I’m taking a pessimistic view for illustration purposes).  That means that @JetBlue is prone to receiving an immediate flood of customer service enquiries from 1,440 travelling passengers, and hundreds of times more that number of enquiries from passengers indirectly affected by the disruption.  This is no small problem to have.  Now, if their social media strategy has trained the consumers that they will get a response in social media they have already created a huge problem!  I cannot engage with any more than 1000 of them anyway!  No number of additional staff manning the social media customer operation will help.  I can serve 500 customers a day with 2 tweets each!  Is that what Twitter is forcing us to consider?  I cannot have a conversation with someone about a customer care situation with 2 x 140 characters! I need more room!  I need more tweets! In emergencies, or periods of intense activity even small scale customer service and social media teams (and I’m talking about 3 or 4 people on duty) hit rate limits!  What do they do?  Down tools and wait for the hour to decay?  At tweet 999 of the day, have to tweet “Sorry folks, that our lot for the day!”.  This is an incredibly important problem folks!  Don’t you agree?

Summary

Perhaps Twitter needs to take a good long hard look at Customer Service and their platform.  My customers are buying quickly into the social media and customer service paradigm.  Right now, Facebook applies NO LIMITS to how often a brand posts on its wall, or the walls of its followers.  Twitter is a NO GO channel for deep customer engagement in customer service.  The limits are simply too low for it to work; even with careful tuning and adaptation of the routing strategy.  With only a handful of customer services representatives representing the brand in Customer Services dedicated accounts they are being rate limited.

A plea for your help and assistance!

If you are a Brand owner, and you care about your customer service and brand experience, please forward a copy of this post to Twitter citing your concerns.  As an industry we must approach Twitter and cause them to open the gates on restricted brands who are struggling to engage due to the limits with only 4 or 5 customer services representatives.  Twitter, your rate limits are fine for outbound Marketing engagement but they are too restrictive for customer engagement.  The Customer Service industry as a whole as that you understand this!  If you’d like us to use Twitter to engage, then we need to be able to do so!