Educational Testing Service (ETS), the nonprofit behind testing brands including GRE (graduate school entrance exam), TOEFL (test of English as a foreign language), and Praxis (teacher licensing exams), manages social care across its portfolio through a centralized model led by Jessica Dillon, Social Media Community Specialist.

As conversation volume increased across brands, ETS needed a better way to identify emerging issues, prioritize responses, and understand what customers were asking for at scale.

Using Sprout Social’s AI-powered sentiment analysis and Smart Inbox tagging capabilities, Dillon transformed recurring customer inquiries into actionable insight. Instead of treating social conversations as isolated interactions, ETS began using them to spot patterns, identify emerging needs, and help teams across the organization respond more effectively.

The questions test takers asked most often helped shape new social community content and FAQ resources, allowing us to provide answers earlier, reduce uncertainty, and better support learners when they needed it most
Jessica Dillon
Social Media Community Specialist at ETS

Turning conversations into signals

As customer inquiries grew, recurring themes around registration, score reporting, testing locations, and at-home testing began appearing across multiple brands. Sprout Social helped surface those patterns earlier. Using AI-powered sentiment and topic tagging in the Smart Inbox, Dillon could quickly identify high-priority issues, track trends over time, and share insights with internal teams before concerns became larger customer experience challenges.

In one instance, a test taker repeatedly sought assistance regarding disability accommodations. Sprout’s sentiment analysis flagged the conversation, allowing the issue to be quickly reviewed with the appropriate ETS team. Armed with the right context, ETS was able to provide a timely, informed, and empathetic public response.

Scaling support while improving performance

The same approach helped ETS maintain responsiveness even as engagement increased.

During the period:

  • GRE message volume increased 64.1% year over year
  • Response times remained within a 3-hour service-level agreement
  • Corporate response time improved from 2 hours to 1 hour 20 minutes
  • TOEFL response times improved from 1 hour 26 minutes to 1 hour 7 minutes
  • Praxis negative sentiment decreased 93.3%

Social insights also informed proactive content and FAQ development. Trend monitoring revealed a 126.5% increase in TOEFL “About the Test” inquiries and a 150% increase in testing location questions, giving ETS the opportunity to address common concerns before future testing cycles.

The business impact

Today, ETS uses Sprout Social to manage customer engagement across multiple testing brands while helping teams better understand customer needs in real time. By combining AI-powered sentiment analysis, Smart Inbox tagging and trend monitoring, ETS transformed social care from a reactive support channel into a source of actionable insight. The result is faster response times, stronger customer support and greater visibility into the issues that matter most to learners.

ETS turned a small but mighty social care operation into a portfolio-wide source of customer insight. Curious what your own social data could reveal?