Twitter has announced a contributors feature announced on its blog that could help firms wanting to use Twitter as a customer service channel.

As corporate Twitter accounts tend to be managed by several staff members, recipients have no idea who is running the account and responding to their tweets.

The new feature will allow companies to tag tweets with the name of the person wrote the Tweet.

The feature appends the contributor’s username to the tweet byline, making the business to consumer communication more personal; e.g. if @Twitter invites @Biz to tweet on its behalf, then a tweet from @Twitter would include @Biz in the byline so that users know more about the real people behind organizations.

The service develops the concept launched by CoTweet in August and as Twitter seeks to commercialise its business it’s a service for which business would be willing to pay.