Money Watch – Personal Finance Blog

First Direct bank have increased their use of Twitter for customer service, with representatives now available 24 hours a day on the site.

The new account, firstdirecthelp, frees up their original first_direct account to look after PR and marketing, and promises to help with customer queries at any time of the day, every day of the year (they may want to alter their bio to say 366 days per year for this leap year).

First Direct’s explain their policy on Twitter on their website:

We regularly update and monitor our Twitter streams and welcome feedback and ideas from all our followers. We endeavour to join the conversation whenever possible. However, we are not able to guarantee that we will reply individually to all the messages we receive via Twitter.

All tweets to our streams are read by us and any emerging themes or helpful suggestions are passed to the relevant people at first direct.

First Direct have lead the way when it comes to UK banks on Twitter (this post has recently been updated with a few more bank Twitter account), happy to recieve feedback and queries via the site.

Other banks have finally started to cotton on to its customer service benefits, and Twitter is often now the first place that bank customers will vent their frustration over service and product issues, so it pays for banks (and of course, companies in general) to maintain a presence there and monitor their brand.

Now, who’s going to stay up until the small hours to see just how responsive they are?