Our social objective has always been to Listen, Engage, and Resolve. At T-Mobile, we pride ourselves on consistently being the most socially devoted brand on Twitter with a less-than-five-minute response time, and we always strive to push the envelope on personalizing our customer interactions. For our latest ground-breaking initiative, we were able to work with Twitter and Lithium, our social support platform, to further our Twitter presence with our customers by launching personal Twitter cards and custom profiles on Twitter. To put a face to a name, our Social Care (T-Force) specialists' pictures, their full name, and a few fun facts about them appear to customers when a conversation starts publicly. After moving to Direct Message, the picture icon and full name remains, so customers always know with whom they are speaking, and our specialists are able to further the human connection with a more personalized experience. This initiative has put the cherry on top of our Listen, Engage, Resolve model. When customers can see the face of the person who's helping them, they are able to engage on a deeper level and create a relationship based on more than just customer and employee. Our positive results in this space solidifies that the road we've paved for personalization is important – and necessary – for us to continue our goal to be Famous For Care.
Our strategy, as it always is, was to create a personalized, differentiated experience for our customers while maintaining our focus on resolution. We never want to be accused of sounding like robots, and with this change, we ensured we never will be. With a social team of more than 200, located at seven different sites in every time zone across the country, this was a large undertaking. We had to collect a headshot from every specialist, but we wanted to put our Un-carrier spin on it, so we supplied props and T-Mobile gear to make it fun. The team filled out profiles for the personal cards detailing a couple fun facts about themselves, complete with emojis, and their favorite thing about T-Mobile. Our development team created a way to package everything together, including supplying a button on the card that leads straight to a Direct Message. We worked with the Lithium engineering teams to integrate the custom profiles in just over a month, which resulted in a defective-free launch. T-Mobile is so far the first and only brand on Twitter to implement such a personalized customer experience strategy. When customers tweet to us publicly, our specialists respond and include the link for their Twitter card within the response. This card not only serves as a face to go only with the name of the person helping the customer, but also a quick and easy way to get the customer to Direct Message, with the DM button built in.
Customers loved it. The media raved about it. Other brands were jealous. Twitter has received an overwhelmingly positive response from the market as well as brands requesting access to the feature. The successful launch partnership has earned a lot of mutual trust and we are well-positioned to continue as a preferred innovation partner with Twitter in future endeavors. The following are media articles reporting on T-Mobile's use of the custom profiles:
a.Adweek: T-Mobile USA Is Helping Twitter Break In a New Customer-Service Feature: Custom Profiles for DMs
b.TechCrunch: Twitter debuts custom profiles for businesses, so people don't think they're talking to bots
c. Marketingland: Twitter's Custom Profiles signal when DMs with brands' bots are handed to a human
d.VentureBeat: Twitter tweaks direct messages for brands so they sound more human
e. Digital Trends: Twitter's customer support profiles show you're chatting with a human, not a bot
f.Engadget: Twitter tests custom profiles for customer service DMs
g.Mashable: Twitter helps brands become more than faceless monoliths to their customers
h.VentureBeat: Twitter tweaks direct messages for brands so they sound more human
In the month before the launch, our survey results showed customers would recommend T-Force 9.18 times out of 10. In the month after the customer profiles launched, that score rose to 9.41, and satisfaction with our representatives is currently sitting at a 9.7.
