NAB has opened a customer service ‘social media command centre’ that, in the lead up to Christmas, will be manned seven days a week.

The command centre will consist of seven staff from the bank’s digital, marketing and corporate affairs team who will monitor and respond to the 5000-odd comments its social media channels currently receive in an average month.

Executive general manager of direct banking at NAB, Sam Plowman, says the investment, in which the bank has partnered with Salesforce Marketing Cloud, has been made to improve the customer service experience no matter the channel.

“This state-of-the-art centre will complement our award-winning customer contact centres to make banking with NAB easier and more accessible for our customers. Our customers don’t switch off on weekends, and now neither do we,” Plowman says.

NAB’s social media community grew more than 350% in 2012 and now has more than 135,000 followers across Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and Google+.

The bank receives around 5000 comments and resolves 600 customer service requests through social media every month, a 10% growth in customer service interactions on social media, on average, for every month in 2012.