Citi Won't Sleep on Customer Tweets

Citigroup has been working for two years to overhaul the way it interacts with customers using social-networking sites run by Twitter, Facebook and others.

To be sure, social media are still a tiny category for Citigroup, representing less than 1% of all customer inquiries. But the use of social media are part of a broader effort to use the information gleaned from these sites to speed up decision making and improve customer relations at the No. 3 U.S. lender by assets. Big banks are notoriously bad at keeping their customers happy. Nearly one out of every five customers has a problem with their bank, according to J.D. Power & Associates. Nowhere is that more apparent than on the Web, where mishandled complaints can go viral and wreak havoc with a bank's reputation in minutes. That is one reason why banks are courting customers in the small, but fast-growing space of social media.