We’re excited to announce two new features to create better conversational experiences between businesses and people on Twitter. Quick replies and welcome messages in Direct Messages make it easier for businesses to guide people to better outcomes through a combination of simple automation and human service.
These features are designed to help businesses create rich, responsive, full-service experiences that directly advance the work of customer service teams and open up new possibilities for how people engage with businesses on Twitter.
Introducing Welcome Messages and Quick Replies
Welcome messages let businesses greet people and set expectations as they enter a Direct Message conversation—without requiring people to send the first message. Businesses can create multiple welcome messages and deep link directly to a specific greeting from Tweets, websites, or apps. Welcome messages help businesses demonstrate their commitment to service and help people learn what options exist to engage with a business in Direct Messages.
Quick replies let businesses prompt people with the best ways to reply to a Direct Message, whether by choosing from a list of options or guiding users to enter specific text values.
When quick replies and welcome messages are used together, businesses can reduce wait times and educate people on the best ways to interact with them. For example, they can enable faster resolutions by helping customers more easily provide information to solve problems before an agent sees the first message, or they can simplify automated services and transactional flows that were difficult in the past.
Connecting Brands and Consumers
Companies including Evernote and Pizza Hut are launching new experiences in Direct Messages that make use of these features.
At Evernote, it is very important to us that we provide the best possible experience across our channels. We are excited about the new features Twitter has developed. The ability to welcome our valued customers and capture their issues before they contact one of our agents helps to streamline the process, accelerate resolution time and reduce customer effort.
Gerald HastieDirector of Global Customer Service at Evernote
The new Pizza Hut social ordering platform is another example of making it easy for our customer to order their favorites from Pizza Hut. We are constantly pursuing ways to simplify our ordering experience. This platform allows our consumers to quickly order or get information within Twitter where they are already spending a great deal of their time.
Baron ConcorsGlobal Chief Digital Officer at Pizza Hut
Developer Solutions
We’ve worked closely with Assist, Audiense, Conversable, Conversocial, Dexter, Hobbynote, Lithium, Massively, Proxima, RozieAI, Spredfast, Sprinklr, and Sprout Social to bring these features to market. If you’re interested in creating automated experiences in Direct Messages for your business, contact those companies directly for more information. We’re working with a wider group of partners who will offer solutions to their customers soon as well.
The features that Twitter has built into Direct Messages will help people get better experiences with businesses on the platform. At Assist, we’re excited to use Twitter’s new features to build innovative solutions that bring faster service and solutions for brands on Twitter.
Shane MacCo-Founder & CEO at Assist
Get Started
These features start rolling out today. For people on Twitter with the latest version of our app, they will start to see these features in Direct Message conversations with accounts like @EvernoteHelps, @PizzaHut, @AirbnbHelp, @SpotifyCares, @NortonSupport, @Tesco, @TfLTravelAlerts, @WeatherNetwork, and @AirTailor.
If you’re a business that provides support in Direct Messages, you can set a default welcome message today in the support settings page of Twitter Dashboard to greet people when they start a conversation.
The developer APIs that power these features are currently in private beta. If you’re a developer and are interested in building these types of solutions in Direct Messages, you can sign up and apply for access here.