When shoppers posed questions to Vitacost.com Inc. on Twitter from Sept. 4 to 11, the retailer typically shot back a response within seconds. 97 seconds, on average to be exact.
Those quick replies made the web-only retailer of vitamins, supplements and diet products—No. 89 in the Internet Retailer 2014 Top 500 Guide— the fastest online merchant at responding to shoppers’ customer service issues posted on Twitter by more than two minutes, according to the Conversocial Index, which tracks how the 100 largest retailers in the 2014 Top 500 respond to customer service issues on Twitter. Social media customer service vendor Conversocial Ltd. compiles the index and provides it exclusively to Internet Retailer.
While Vitacost responds exceptionally quickly, other big online retailers are also improving their performance significantly. Overall, the largest online retailers cut their average response times 46.2% from last year—from 11 hours and 15 minutes to 6 hours and 3 minutes.
The only other Top 100 retailers with average response times less than 10 minutes were Walgreen Co., No. 43 in the Top 500 Guide, at 3 minutes and 47 seconds and Best Buy Co. Inc., No. 15, at 4 minutes and 42 seconds.
While Vitacost’s replies were lighting fast, Twitter users were hardly bombarding it with messages; the retailer received an average of 0.9 @mentions per hour during the study’s window. An @mention is a Twitter update that contains a brand’s @username anywhere in the body of the tweet, which indicates a shopper is attempting to communicate with the brand. Meanwhile, Walgreens and Best Buy maintained their quick speeds while receiving 78 and 41.2 mentions per hour, respectively.
The index also examines the percentage of @mentions that the Top 500 retailers respond to. And despite receiving an average of 91.2 @mentions per hour, Nike Inc., No. 64 in the Top 500 Guide, still led the pack on this measure. The manufacturer and retailer responded to 72.5% of its @mentions, far outpacing the 15.4% average across all 81 retailers that reply to shoppers’ tweets.
Slightly behind Nike were Newegg Inc., No. 17 in the Top 500 Guide, which replied to 63.2% of @mentions (it received 5.4 @mentions per hour), and J. Crew Group Inc., No. 60, which replied to 55.6% of @mentions (it received 40.9 @mentions per hour).
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