Growing Sprout’s Partnership With Twitter: First Access to New Data Helps Brands Improve Social Customer Care

At Sprout Social, we have been a strategic partner in the Twitter Certified Program since 2012 and, more recently, deepened our partnership through selection into the Twitter Official Partner Program. Today, we reach another relationship milestone: Twitter and Sprout are working together to further technology solutions for social customer service.

“We want to make it easier than ever before for brands to provide top-notch customer service on Twitter,” said Chris Moody, Vice President of Data Strategy at Twitter. “We are excited to work alongside Sprout Social to help consumers and brands have a better customer service experience on Twitter.”

People increasingly turn to Twitter to ask for help, make buying decisions, lodge complaints and engage in an ongoing dialogue with brands. Through this latest partnership, Sprout now has first access to new data—both historical and real-time—that joins with Sprout’s existing social care tools, including conversation history, tasking and workflow, helpdesk and CRM integrations, unified inbox and several reports focused on responsiveness and care-related metrics.

“Twitter is a highly efficient communication channel that enables teams to not only answer service-related questions but also to build lasting, value-driven relationships,” said Justyn Howard, CEO of Sprout Social. “Managing social customer service conversations effectively requires centralized communication, consolidated tools and contextual information.”

Collectively, these features comprise the Social Care Suite, which is available exclusively in Sprout’s Advanced plan. The Suite enables us to improve features and offer new tools that address these behaviors while empowering businesses and agencies to create even more remarkable customer experiences.

Taking a Twitter-First Approach

Underscoring the need for businesses to provide better customer care on social, the latest Sprout Social Index reports a 110% year-over-year increase of social messages that warrant a response from a brand. What’s more, according to McKinsey, brands that proactively invite customers to engage on Twitter realize several benefits, including higher customer satisfaction rates, lower cost per interaction, increased brand reputation and additional service-to-sales opportunities.

Many Sprout customers recognize the importance of social customer care and already reap the rewards of attentiveness. But if you’re looking to hone your online customer service strategy even further, several components should stay top of mind. Chief among them:

• Identify and implement tools and technology that afford seamless customer support.
• Research and acknowledge common questions, known issues and proper sources for customer answers.
• Obtain access to powerful and relevant social context and conversation history to more swiftly and personally resolve issues.
• Proactively uncover opportunities to solve issues before they arise, and create moments of delight.
• Ensure organizational accountability by measuring the efficiency and impact of Twitter communication.

Continued Commitment & Product Innovation

As social customer care becomes more important, Twitter continues to provide its most trusted partners with exclusive access to the powerful data and tools necessary to build better products that help drive business forward.

“Twitter’s attention to social customer care aligns with Sprout’s mission to create open communication between people and brands,” Howard said. “The insights we gain, the improvements we make and the features we enhance are a direct reflection of our shared commitment to the marketplace and, most especially, to our customers.”

Team Sprout works tirelessly to bring you product updates and feature enhancements that make your job more effective and efficient. Among the first granted access to this new Twitter data, we will keep you updated on our ongoing partnership, highlighting how it will enable you to better serve your customers, Tweet by Tweet.

Read more about Twitter’s initiative on social customer care.

---