How To Unlock Twitter Customer Service Benchmarks You Can Actually Use

Aditi Raghavan
August 8, 2014 • 3 min read
Updated on September 19, 2019
“How do we figure out how we are performing when nothing is going on?”
It’s a question we often hear from Unmetric users. What appears to be a deceptively simple query, turns out to be a real problem. When brands run a campaign or have a tweet that’s gone viral, it’s pretty easy to figure out what is causing that crazy Follower growth. That said – What about when it’s downtime? When it’s just another day in the social media calendar? How do you benchmark your brand’s performance then?
Cut Out the Noise and Outliers.
That’s the answer. This means you want to dampen the impact of something like that one-off-viral product launch tweet by your competitors and their teams working overtime to respond to all those Twitter users who replied (or when their teams have all gone on holiday) – on your benchmarks. This way you can compare your brand against your industry’s everyday performance.
On Unmetric, you can unlock this capability in 3 easy steps.
Step 1. Figure out your Average Reply Time (ART).
Let’s take a look at how @McDonalds performed in the last week. The brand topped out with an ART of 4 hrs, 19 min, 34 sec.
Sounds pretty good, right? Now let’s take a look at how they stand up against the sector and other big players in the Restaurant & Cafe sector.
Yes, we are on point. On average, @McDonalds does great on their ART beating the Average Response Time of the sector (6 hrs, 11 min) by more than 2 hrs.
Step 2. Make the shift from Average Benchmarking to Median Benchmarking.
The median ART value is the middle value in the list of the ARTs of all the brands in a sector arranged from the least to the most. Unlike the average, median isn’t influenced by a few large values in the dataset so you get a sense of the real number you should measure your metrics against.
In the Settings page in the Account tab, you can shift your default benchmark value over from average to median.
Step 3. Now benchmark your Average Reply Time (ART) to the Median.
Let’s head on back over to @McDonalds and see how they do now.
Look at that! When you benchmark to the median, the ART of the sector goes down to a remarkable 2 hrs, 28 mins – an enviable ART by any standards.
With @PizzaHut and @Subway on top of those numbers, @McDonalds has a great benchmark to work with to judge their customer service performance on Twitter.