Study compares British bookmakers' Twitter responsiveness

ersocial, the social media customer service firm, have conducted a study comparing how quickly and effectively bookmakers are responding to customer enquiries on Twitter.

The research found that bookmakers respond in an average of 37 minutes with times varying between five seconds and over three days.

The firm with the quickest average response was Betfair whose replies took just 3 minutes and 7 seconds on average. William Hill were second with around 12 minutes and Paddy Power third with nearly 20 minutes. Skybet, Betfred and Bet365 were all between 20 and 30 minutes while Coral was by far the worst, taking nearly an hour-and-a-half to respond on average.

The study also measured the percentage of tweets that bookmakers responded to. The average across the eight companies was 20%. Again, Betfair scored the top mark by responding to 69% of tweets and Paddy Power scored strongly with 56%. SkyBet were third with 41% and there is a long gap before fourth-placed William Hill's 25%. Coral scored poorly again, responding to only 14% of enquiries which was one percentage point above Bet365. Worst of all was Betfred whose social media team responded to only 9.2% of enquiries.

Conversocial praised the industry’s speed in responding to customer enquiries. "With five of the seven reviewed companies making a first response to customer service enquries in 30 minutes or less, we can see that this is clearly understood by the industry leaders," the report finds.

The report also recommends having a dedicated customer service twitter handle which SkyBet, Betfair and Paddy Power all do. The study states that "dedicated handles work well by offering customers a resource just for their issues, and saves time working through "noise" or non-customer service messages." Noise is a particular problem when in-play gambling on major events is taking place. The dedicated customer service handle advice is reinforced by the fact that Betfair and Paddy Power had the best results in the study.