Well known brands are struggling to respond to customer service demands over Twitter despite the increasing popularity of using the social network to contact businesses, with many companies taking well over six hours to reply to questions.

Insight agency BDRC Continentals mystery shopping service Twystery conducted a study into some of the UKs top brands to see how immediate and helpful the responses on Twitter were.

Overall, Lloyds Bank was the best, scoring 78 out of 100, with NatWest, Morrisons, Barclays, Sainsburys and HSBC all also scoring over 75. Financial services and supermarkets scored the best overall, but when broken down by the three components used to form the overall score, there were significant differences.

Only five companies responded to every tweet – Waitrose, NatWest, Barclays, Asda and Morrisons, with BT and EE performing worst in terms of response rate, with 63 per cent and 73 per cent respectively.

Lloyds Bank and SW Trains performed best in terms of response time, averaging one hour five minutes, followed by Waitrose and Hilton with one hour 21 minutes. EE brought up the rear again, with an average response time of almost 20 hours, a full eight hours slower than the next company O2, with 11 hours 42 minutes. Overall, the average sat at just under six hours.

Looking at quality of response, Sky and Virgin Media provided the most comprehensive and helpful replies, rated at 89 and 82 respectively. Barclays and Sainsburys (both at 76) and Tesco (73) made up the rest of the top five.

“With so many people able to connect to social media 24/7 through their smartphone, tweeting a question or complaint is becoming second nature,” said Tim Barber, director at BDRC Continental. “As people increasingly use Twitter to contact brands hoping for a quick response, its important that brands benchmark heir performance to see what service consumers are experiencing elsewhere.

“Twitter offers a great platform to improve customer engagement levels and deliver excellent brand service, but as weve seen, some of Britains biggest brands are falling behind. In our research, financial services providers and supermarkets can be rightly proud of their performance on Twitter – lets hope the others can catch up.”