How seriously do brands take social customer care? We’ve seen examples of best practice (and poor effort) on Twitter from brands in the States, now Brand Embassy is putting the spotlight on UK companies.

Its report, ‘Social (s)caring brands’, pits Facebook and email against one another in the service stakes and reveals that customers relying on email correspondence can expect to wait 13 hours longer for a response than customers approaching brands via Facebook.

The study found that the fastest responding industry on Facebook is home and garden, with an average 2:28:30 response time. By contrast, the fastest responding industry via email is the electronics sector, delivering customer service in a comparatively whopping 16:38:00.

The slow stakes throw up some interesting results. The IT sector (IT) took the longest to reply on Facebook, with a time of 39:09:30, whereas email saw FMCG (‘fast’ moving consumer goods) and telecommunications dragging their heels with times of 56:45:30 and 114:35:00 respectively. The irony of an industry specialising in communication taking nearly five whole days to respond to customer queries is quite apparent.

At the top of the charts, though, are three of the country’s biggest supermarket chains. Sainsbury’s, Waitrose and Tesco all deliver Facebook-centric service within lightning-fast timeframes (14, 17 and 24 minutes respectively), and also score points when it comes to the relevance of responses.

No data on those failing the relevancy test, but you need only search “sorry to hear that” on Twitter to find scores of brands delivering the same copy/paste response to customer after customer.

After so many examples of brands struggling with social service this year, it’s refreshing to see good efforts being applauded. Companies should examine these supermarkets’ strategies in a bid to emulate their success.