Twitter Offers Chatbots In DMs

Twitter is upping its chatbot game.

To better help brands converse with users and offer customer support, the company is launching two new products that will help answer basic questions and address complaints. The new features let companies partner with nearly a dozen third-party services to build automated-message systems specific to each brand.

One of the new products, Welcome Messages, lets businesses "greet" users when they receive a direct message by automatically replying with information about what they can expect from the online exchange. Another product, Quick Replies, lets businesses prompt users on how to get their questions answered without involving a human (or if they need a living, breathing person, to know how they can find one to talk to), not unlike an automated system for customer-service calls.

Nearly a dozen brands are launching automated messaging services using Twitter's new products, including Evernote, Pizza Hut, Spotify, Tesco, Norton and Airbnb.

The number of tweets from customers to brands' customer-service handles is on the rise, with total volume increasing two and a half times in the past two years. Direct messages across the platform are also rising steadily. According to the company's first-quarter earnings letter to shareholders, total unique DMs were up nearly 50 percent in the past year.Lord knows, I am a fan of this . Last month I spent about 2 weeks in a deep DM session with TMobile to resolve an issue: