BT and EE fail the Twitter test

Meanwhile, Lloyds Bank, NatWest and Morrisons came out as the top performers according to the mystery shopping survey Twystery by BDRC Continental which measured how effective brands are at handling customer queries via Twitter.

As customers increasingly use Twitter as an easy method of communicating with companies – be it to reach customer service or register complaints – companies have had to manage this deluge of contact and with response rates that people expect on social media.

So, Twystery assesses a brand’s social media response rate, speed, and quality to provide an insight into the social media performance of some of the UK’s biggest brands.

Overall the top performers (scored out of 100 ) were Lloyds, NatWest, Morrisons, Barclays, Sainbury’s and HSBC, with financial services at 78 and supermarkets at 72 coming out as the top sectors.

However in terms of response rate only five companies responded to every tweet – Waitrose, NatWest, Barclays, Asda and Morrisons. BT and EE only achieved response rates of 63% and 73% respectively.

Lloyds Bank and SW Trains had the fastest response time with an average of 1 hour and 5 minutes, followed by Waitrose and Hilton at 1:21, HSBC 1:33 and NatWest 1:42. EE again came last with an average response time of 19:47 – eight hours after the next nearest player, O2 at 11:42. The average was just under six hours.

Sky and Virgin Media had the best quality of response.