Airlines are among many companies that interact with customers via Twitter for customer service complaints. Today Twitter pulled the wraps off "customer support prompts," which should help airline staff respond to passenger feedback.
Companies now can add deep links to direct messages beneath their tweets to passengers -- helpful for taking a complaint off the public platform and for allowing much longer messages back-and-forth (to speed up a resolution).
Delta Air Lines, which has more than 600,000 followers on Twitter, has already been trialing the service via its @DeltaAssist Twitter handle.
The representatives will no longer have to ask travelers to follow the Delta Twitter account to be able to send them a Direct Message. The deep link bypasses that process.
What's more, in a blog post today, Twitter also said that a few "select brands" will get to use new functionality named Customer Feedback, which will enable businesses like airlines let users rate their interactions in private direct messages.
This later tool will appear within the next few weeks. Customer feedback collected on Twitter is surfaced in a Customer Feedback Report that shows Net Promoter Scores and other data.
JetBlue and other airlines are said to be interested in the services.
Twitter worked with third party service SparkCentral as a go-between with the airlines and other companies. Since late last year, Delta has worked with the service, as this promotional video illustrates: