Favstar founder launches Respondly to help companies use Twitter as a service desk

Today, the founder of Favstar has taken the wraps off a new service: Respondly, a team support inbox for Twitter.

Twitter has become one of the easiest ways to engage with and get support from many companies. The likes of Xbox and Target offer support on the service, alongside trying to engage with users on a more personal level.

If you’ve ever been at the helm of a relatively large corporate Twitter account, you can likely relate to this problem. It can be hard to keep up with the amount of mentions you receive, especially considering just how quickly the stream can flow, and as a result some customers’ tweets can get quickly buried.

Favstar founder Tim Haines saw this problem at the company, saying that the team at Favstar “were getting crushed by the daily onslaught of these support tweets” and when it looked for tools to address the problem they found “nothing tailored to customer support and social-media workflows.”

Tim and Phil Cockfield, a developer and designer at Favstar who was also passionate about solving the problem, set out to build a solution Respondly.

Respondly creates a single place for people across a company to track and reply to public mentions and allows staff to discuss/assign tweets internally before responding publicly to customers. Think of it as a support desk for social media.

Companies are able to track the status of support requests with specific customers over time and ensure that no mention goes unanswered.

The service also allows staff members to use the service for their own tweets, offering a ‘personal’ inbox that encourages them to interact inside Respondly for their own accounts and keep up the same quality of response used on corporate accounts.

Respondly has been in private beta for a few months and already has customers such as Stripe, Tapbots, Pocket, npm and Favstar using the service full-time.

There are a number of other tools out there for this purpose, such as Zendesk which allows you to favorite tweets and turn them into support tickets as well as others such as Postling, Freshdesk and Engagor but they don’t appear to be as simple to use nor do they encourage personal users to use their service.

Today, Respondly is available for all to sign up for, with a free trial for new customers and paid plans starting at $9 per month.

➤ Respondly