Paychex is a leading Human Capital Management (HCM) provider, serving approximately 800,000 businesses with essential solutions like payroll, HR, retirement and employee benefits.

While Paychex already maintained an active social media presence, social media publishing was often an afterthought in campaign planning, and customer care on social platforms involved manual processes that compromised efficiency and speed in responding to customers. The teams recognized an opportunity to evolve. Paychex adopted Sprout Social, transforming its Organic Social and 24/7 Care teams into a strategic, cohesive social powerhouse that exemplifies measurable business impact and operational excellence.

The cost of operating in silos

Before implementing Sprout, the Organic Social team primarily operated in a reactive, publishing-only model, where social posts were treated as merely a “checkbox” function fulfilled at the end of campaign plans. The team had little strategic influence or feedback mechanism to inform future campaigns and operated as a just-in-time service organization to broader marketing efforts.

At the same time, the Care team used a separate platform to manage customer responses on social channels, and relied on complex legacy systems and manual spreadsheets for daily executive reporting and performance tracking. Valuable time was spent forwarding communications and reconciling data instead of maximizing efficiency to respond thoughtfully and quickly to customers’ requests for support.

These challenges highlighted the limitations of the tools themselves. Brittney Luedtke, Lead of Organic Social Media at Paychex, had extensive experience using the organization’s legacy social platforms, finding other social media management platforms so complicated and technically complex that her team relied on near-constant support from the vendor. Her team needed a platform that did more than consolidate social tasks: It had to connect the work, accelerate cross-team visibility and empower teams to take swift action.

Sprout’s intuitive UI was a key factor in their decision to choose Sprout Social, ensuring that the entire team, including Care supervisors who weren’t daily users on the platform, could onboard immediately without leaning on technical support or extensive training. Combined with the social media management suite’s extensive reporting capabilities and support for integrated workflows across functions, the switch to Sprout offered collaborative efficiency and ease unmatched by other vendors.

Social as a business intelligence engine

For Luedtke, with her team’s focus on social publishing and employee advocacy, the goal was simple: Elevate social from a marketing function to the backbone of a data-driven business strategy.

Leveraging Paychex’s guiding principle is that “data is only powerful when it drives decisions.” Luedtke uses Sprout’s Reporting and Analytics tools to empower the Organic Social team to deliver on meaningful business metrics, including engagement rate by reach, social share of voice and lead attributions.

Paychex tracks the impact of their internal brand advocates using the financial metric of Earned Media Value (EMV) in Sprout Employee Advocacy, calculating the value based on Paychex-specific CPMs and reporting it back to executives in dollars—a critical metric they could never have reported on using prior tools. In the first month after onboarding Sprout Employee Advocacy in August 2025, Paychex’s Organic Social team has generated over $300,000 in EMV. The team also leverages Sprout’s Salesforce integration to link social actions directly to leads, another source of attributable financial impact for the social strategy.

Sprout is the backbone of how we manage our social channels, how we’re measuring our social channels and our impact at Paychex.

Brittney Luedtke
Organic Social Lead at Paychex

Beyond performance data, Luedtke’s team now captures qualitative social insights that add value far beyond marketing. For example, Sprout Listening identifies trigger events (such as a CFO or CHRO change in an enterprise account) and provides the sales team with immediate, actionable intelligence. It also tracks real-time small business conversations around regulatory changes, insights the social team shares with the Brand, Creative and Engagement team to inform proactive communications campaigns that cement Paychex’s position as an industry thought leader.

The ability to manage online reputation is critical for Paychex, especially in volatile economic times. Luedtke notes that even informational posts about tax or regulatory updates can quickly draw hundreds of comments, escalating into politically charged, high-brand-risk conversations unrelated to HCM. Instead of intervening, which can exacerbate rising tensions, the team uses Sprout Tagging and Reporting to monitor conversation volatility, identify which content triggers debate and report on emerging risks to executive stakeholders without engaging directly in the conflict.

Care at lightning speed

Michelle Latoy, 24/7 Enterprise Manager, leads the team dedicated to Paychex’s elite customer service standard that maintains non-stop, year-round coverage with a strict 15-minute service level agreement (SLA) for responding to customers on social channels. Their success at meeting this goal was hamstrung by manual administrative processes and tracking when working in prior social media tools.

“One of the biggest pain points was we had to manually track everything. I could show you the ugly spreadsheets! Now we can do it all within Sprout,” adds Latoy.

Bringing the Care team along on the move to Sprout’s centralized social management suite eliminated manual tracking and immediately streamlined workflows for the 13 dedicated social support representatives, allowing them to focus entirely on speedy customer response and resolution.

The Care team quickly adopted Sprout’s dedicated case management capabilities and delivered a monumental efficiency win: Paychex decreased its average SLA response time by 67% within 60 days. Supervisors use Sprout’s Inbox Team Reports to track individual agents’ progress on cases, ensuring the team workload is balanced and they are successfully complying with the 15-minute SLA.

Since care representatives are trained from a traditional phone service approach, they often need help crafting appropriate social-friendly responses that adhere to the brand voice and tone.

The team embraces Sprout AI to move away from scripted templates and deliver a more authentic and personalized response for every social interaction, while striking the right balance between automation efficiency and a high-quality human interaction that Paychex customers expect from the industry-leading brand.

Latoy shares “We’re not trained on social media. Our agents are thinking about it with the service mindset. Using Sprout’s AI functionality to help rewrite responses makes them more personable.”

One source of shared social intelligence

The greatest win for Paychex was the unification of Organic Social and customer care workflows into one integrated platform, breaking down departmental silos and creating a shared view of customer interactions on social media.

Prior to Sprout, I don’t think we had a really good relationship between the two teams, because we worked in two different systems. The easy collaboration we have now is a huge win cross-functionally.

Michelle Latoy
24/7 Enterprise Manager at Paychex

The Smart Inbox is now an operational hub. The ability to instantly tag, assign and track messages—everything from a positive customer comment for Organic Social to a complicated customer relations issue which Care resolves—replaces hours of internal emails and administrative work.

“If you add up all of these tasks, even the three-minute ones, it’s so much time during the week that was being taken away from other important work. Not having to do that manual handoff with Sprout, where we have one voice of truth, is phenomenal,”adds Luedtke.

This single, integrated system ensures that whether a customer is celebrating a win or raising a critical issue, Paychex is ready with a unified, professional and swift response.

The new standard for social enterprises

Paychex’s success proves that in the modern era, all business is social. The right platform is one that empowers their teams to be thoughtfully engaged, efficient and driving strategic impact no matter the economic environment.

It doesn’t matter if you’re B2B or B2C, your business is shaped by online conversation. Those that listen, those that respond and who engage authentically, will lead the future of social media.

Brittney Luedtke
Organic Social Lead at Paychex

Learn how Sprout Social can help your organization transform social insights into business strategy. Request your free demo today.