The most-mentioned e-retailers on Twitter aren’t wasting any time replying to shoppers’ complaints on the social network, according to the latest Internet Retailer-exclusive Conversocial Index, which tracks how the 100 largest retailers in the 2014 Top 500 Guide respond to customer service-related posts on Twitter.

The index finds that 62% of responses from the 50 most-mentioned e-retailers on Twitter occurred within an hour of customers tweeting their issues during the period of Dec. 4-11. That’s a significant jump from the last Conversocial Index for November, when 49% of those merchants replied within an hour.

The average response time across the December Index was 4 hours and 6 minutes, with Best Buy Co. Inc., No. 15 in the 2014 Top 500 Guide, leading the way among the most-mentioned merchants. Best Buy, which is one of 23 merchants among the 50 most-mentioned retailers with a dedicated custom service handles (it is @BestBuySupport), replied to shoppers’ tweets within five minutes and 12 seconds, on average.

Three other Top 100 retailers responded on average in less than 10 minutes: HSN Inc., No. 26 in the Top 500 Guide, at 8 minutes and 4 seconds; Nordstrom Inc., No. 24, at 8 minutes and 22 seconds; and Urban Outfitters, No. 48, at 9 minutes and 31 seconds. Nordstrom and Urban Outfitters’ response were particularly impressive given that the retailers received 31.1 and 37.7 mentions per hour, respectively. HSN received 8.6 mentions per hour.

Of course, fast response times only tell part of the story, says Mike Schneider, Conversocial’s director of growth. “Actual resolution is the most important thing,” he says, noting that a company can respond with a low-quality response quickly, which doesn’t necessarily satisfy the customer.

At the other end of the spectrum, four retailers among the 50 most-mentioned that responded to shoppers took more than a day to reply. And OfficeMax Inc., No. 12, took two days on average, even though it only received an average of 4.4 @mentions per hour. The other retailers that took more than a day were Oriental Trading Co., No. 93 (1 day and 8 hours); Ascena Retail Group, No. 86 (1 day and 5 hours); and Office Depot Inc., No. 9 (1 day 5 hours).

The index also examines the percentage of @mentions that the Top 500 retailers respond to. Six merchants replied to at least half of their mentions: Nike Inc., No. 64 in the Top 500 Guide, replied to 72.1% of its 8.9 mentions per hour; Microsoft Corp., No. 92, replied to 55.7% of its 5.1 mentions per hour; Sears Holdings Corp., No. 5, replied to 54.9% of its 3.4 mentions per hour; Amazon.com Inc., No. 1, replied to 54.7% of its 30.9 mentions per hour; Best Buy replied to 51.7% of its 13.7 mentions per hour; and J. Crew Group Inc., No. 60, replied to 51.2% of its 29.4% mentions per hour. Each of those six merchants maintains customer service handles, such as @SearsCares and @jcrew_help.

 

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