@Customer - your tweet has been acknowledged

How will you react if a brand provides this response to your tweets and Facebook posts? Though still to experience it myself but have seen few brands responding something similar in my circles. Considering a customer will generally rant on social media as the last resolution, this kind of response from brand just worsen the whole engagement. 

It is a fair assumption that the automated reply to social media mentions is still naive and hence most brands have customer service representatives trained on monitoring these mentions and respond accordingly. But, even with manual interventions, brands are using response of a mere acknowledgement. In my view,this should be a big NO when engaging through social media channels. And if an automated solution is being used or is a part of your strategy, you have not got the essence of social media.

Having said that, I am not endorsing that one should not look for automation. With so much noise on social media channels such as twitter, it is imperative for brands to leverage technology to identify the most prominent posts and key users. Though what I have observed is that apart from Sentiment and Influencer score, the solutions in the market are yet to evolve to address the real need of brands.

For instance, let us compare two tweets -

Sentiment or tone is negative for both but intent and intensity of both tweets are very different! First tweet is about losing a customer to a competitor due to poor customer service and second, chance of a sale getting lost. The person who should respond to both cannot be same. However employing just a person for routing to the right person do not make sense either!

Thus, there is still lot of potential to innovate on technology front and make the brands more responsive with social media channels. Hence, the key is to strike the perfect balance - the right usage of technology where it matters and people who will use it to create a positive customer experience.