BoldChat will demonstrate how retailers can more efficiently leverage Twitter as a customer service tool at the Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition 2012 next week.

Visitors to LogMeIn Inc.’s BoldChat booth will see a demonstration of the vendor’s Twitter integration that enables a retailer to search for, and manage, Twitter conversations among multiple Twitter accounts within BoldChat’s software, says Ross Haskell, the vendor’s director of marketing. The technology also ties together a consumer’s multiple tweets so that an agent can view several posts as a conversation. The agent can also see the consumer’s past posts related to the retailer.

To improve the efficiency of call center agents’ replies, the software can be configured to automatically assign the task of replying to tweets to specific agents based on rules that a call center manager or retailer sets. If an agent doesn’t reply in a set time period, the software can automatically route the task to another agent.

“Consumers are using Twitter to get customer service help,” he says. “This is really about making it more efficient for agents to help them.”

The vendor plans to begin testing the technology in the third quarter.

Social media is emerging as an increasingly important customer service channel. A recent survey found that 17% of U.S. consumers had used social media for customer service at least once within the past year. And those consumers who have turned to Twitter and other social networks for assistance are willing to increase their spending by 21% with companies that provide “great” customer service, the report says. That compares with an 11% bump in spending for those respondents who had not used social media for customer service.