Elevate your support with social media customer service software

Brands today know that loyal customers are not a given–they’re earned. The right social media customer service software can make it easier to win audiences over and keep them on your side.

Social customer care teams face complexity daily. They have to manage complaints and requests, all seemingly high-priority and split across social networks, in a timely manner. On top of this, they experience opaque team workflows leading to redundant efforts, fragmented communication and the risk of off-brand messaging.

The right social customer care software not only offsets these challenges—it empowers your customer care teams to work seamlessly and improve response rates. It also provides you with smarter workflow management, a clear view into team performance and a unified brand voice.

Let’s take a closer look at how you can benefit from intelligent social media customer service software like Sprout Social.

1. Improve team collaboration with a unified, intuitive platform

Customer care teams are often overwhelmed juggling different social media profiles while managing multiple tasks simultaneously. This complexity is compounded when they have to work on different tools in the backend.

Having a platform that centralizes profile management can be a game-changer. It can provide cross-functional visibility to customer service and social teams so they can collaborate more strategically to complete tasks faster.

Sprout’s Smart Inbox does this by aggregating all your messages in a single location, empowering your team members to work from a single source of truth.

As your business grows, so will your need to have more hands on deck to serve your customers. Scaling efficiently (not to mention delivering a consistent brand experience) means there needs to be a perfect sync among your social and customer care teams.

Sprout’s Message Approval Workflows are built exactly for this need. The feature lets users customize step-by-step processes that enable teams to coordinate outgoing messages.

With Message Approval Workflows, you can expertly manage global teams and prevent situations like typos, off-brand posts or insensitive responses that can jeopardize your customer relationships.

2. Thoughtfully engage your audience for deeper customer loyalty

Thirty-four percent of consumers would leave a brand because of inefficient customer service, according to a PwC survey, underscoring the need for customer care teams to be proactive.

Intuitive social media customer service software gives your teams the context to be proactive and engage with customers more effectively.

For example, Sprout’s Suggested Replies can be used to respond faster to commonly asked questions on Twitter.

Suggested Replies are not the usual canned responses. They are driven by AI-powered semantic analysis, allowing the tool to understand the context of each message, recognize topics and themes within them, and then suggest the best-suited responses.

Customer care teams can select the best Suggested Reply and make edits to personalize the message with additional details.

Social media customer service software also helps you manage customer data systematically so you have a deeper understanding of your audience. This is critical, especially when 84% of customer service and support leaders cite customer data and analytics as a top priority for achieving organizational goals.

Given this, it is imperative that a social customer care software is compatible with your customer relationship management (CRM) software. Sprout’s Salesforce integration gives you that functionality.

The integration allows Salesforce users to manage all their social customer care requests directly from Service Cloud while enriching CRM profiles with social data for a comprehensive view of customer interactions.

For example, when a first-time customer reaches out to you on social regarding an issue with an online order, insights based on their previous interactions with your brand, purchase history and location can help your teams go above and beyond to assist them. This makes your customers feel valued and inspires brand loyalty.

3. Increase efficiency and get more from your tech stack

Nearly half of customer care leaders in the US experienced staff attrition in 2021, resulting in their already overworked teams becoming stretched even thinner.

Social media customer service software can help customer care teams of any size be more agile so they can manage customer demands across social networks while coordinating tasks. It also allows you greater team-wide visibility so that no one wastes time on redundant work.

Sprout’s Collision Detection gives you this capability. It ensures that no two team members respond to the same message. If someone on the team is working on a customer reply, other team members can see it in real time so that no one duplicates efforts.

In addition to Salesforce, Sprout’s integrations with CRM and help desk tools such as Zendesk, Microsoft Dynamics 365 and HubSpot further improve your customer service efficiency by giving you a unified experience across all interactions.

This lets you leverage the full worth of your existing tech stack—a requirement especially when many teams’ budgets are under scrutiny.

4. Demonstrate team impact with data

To build a truly exceptional customer service experience you need to build a team that is strategically performance-driven.

The right social customer care software should give you a full audit of your team’s activity, progress and benchmarks against the metrics that matter. This gives you the ability to see patterns in your incoming messages, customer responses and more, so you can learn from them and adjust your strategy.

Sprout’s Case Performance Report lets you measure your team’s productivity and efficiency over a period of time. You can also deep dive into individual and group performance metrics such as First Touch, Active Case Time, Time Resolution and more.

 

Sprout’s Tagging capabilities further keep your customer care team organized and provide you with targeted customer and product insights. You can tag all incoming or outgoing messages based on categories or keywords, and by doing so, pull reports on customer insights for product improvement effortlessly, whenever you want.

Check out how Grammarly uses Tagging in Sprout to level up customer care and engagement.

Fuel your customer strategy with the right social media customer service software

Social media customer service software can be a gateway to proactive, invaluable customer care that helps retain customers and differentiates you from the competition. Try out Sprout Social to fuel your customer service strategy with our 30-day free trial.