Prepping your social customer care team for the holiday rush with Sprout

Holiday shoppers no longer line up outside big box stores for the best deals. Instead, they’re turning to social media to find, research and buy gifts. And when their shopping experience falls short, social is where they go to ask questions and share their frustrations.

Sprout Social’s Q4 2024 Pulse Survey shows that this holiday season, 57% of consumers plan to use social media for customer service as often as they did in 2023, with 35% expecting to use it even more. As the peak shopping season approaches, social customer service volumes are set to rise along with holiday demand.

To keep things running smoothly, customer care teams must make the most of all available resources. Luckily, Sprout Social is equipped with tools designed to alleviate the holiday rush while strengthening customer relationships—a gift that keeps on giving well after the holiday season.

‘Tis the season to bolster your customer care strategy. Keep reading to shape your strategy and to find out which Sprout features will set your team and customers up for success during this crucial period of customer service during the holidays.

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Why social needs to be at the center of holiday customer service

Answering customer questions on social sits firmly in the center of the social media and customer care Venn diagram.

Social media is a direct line to your customers. And during the holiday season, their outreach will inevitably increase, further extending social’s crossover into the customer care realm.

Let’s look at three key ways social media must be central to your holiday customer service.

Social is the home of product discovery

“TikTok made me buy it” is more than a catchy phrase. It’s a reflection of the influence social media has on buying behavior—on TikTok and beyond.

Social media is a virtual mall designed for product discovery, social proof and purchasing all in one place—and its popularity is only growing. Nearly half (47%) of all consumers plan to use social more to find holiday gift ideas in 2024.

Influencer recommendations are a top source of inspiration across all age groups—up from a fifth place spot when we last asked consumers in Q4 2023.

This aligns with a broader trend of increasing influencer impact—our 2024 Influencer Marketing Report found that 86% of consumers surveyed make a purchase inspired by an influencer at least once a year.

To stay relevant during the holiday season, customer service must prioritize social media, meeting shoppers at the heart of their gift search. Outfitting your team with the training and customer care social media tools they need boosts customer satisfaction by resolving issues where they’re most active.

Customer outreach on social media will surge during the holiday season

Research shows that brands will experience an uptick in social customer care requests throughout the holidays. Knowing where and how those messages will come in is critical to your seasonal success.

Social users who contact brands on social media overwhelmingly prefer direct messaging. Other popular methods of outreach include posting comments or tagging a company publicly.

Having visibility and access to social is crucial for delivering strong customer service. If customer care teams are only reviewing and responding to email, phone and web form requests, they’re not getting the full picture of holiday-time customer service needs.

Consumers reach out on social during every step of their shopping journey

From inquiring about restocks to posting reviews, customers engage with social media at every stage of their shopping journey.

Social media content sways purchasing decisions for 89% of consumers—promo codes make the biggest impact, followed by content from regular social media users.

And when it comes to contacting brands, consumers do have network preferences. Facebook, Instagram and TikTok are the top three platforms consumers expect to use to contact brands during the holiday season. All the more reason your team needs access and, if necessary, training on engaging through these channels.

Remember: A stellar holiday customer service strategy doesn’t just resolve issues—it can turn casual shoppers into loyal customers and enthusiastic advocates. At the same time, a strategy that doesn’t account for social has the power to do the opposite.

8 tips to improve your customer service during the holidays

Holiday-related spikes in support requests can be stressful. But the right process and tools can empower your team to rise to the challenge of providing exceptional holiday-time customer service.

If you want to revisit and revise your team processes before the rush hits, here are eight tips for enhancing your holiday customer service strategy and some ways Sprout can help along the way.

1. Plan ahead

The holidays feel like they start earlier every year. If you’re not planning for the holiday surge—by organizing your team, prepping your media and solidifying influencer partnerships—you’re risking the chaos of last-minute adjustments.

Avoid the scramble of catching up in a busy season. Plan to ensure smooth sailing before the ‘season’s greetings’ decor goes up.

Consider the other milestones your agents should align with—think: key dates for holiday marketing, like Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales or the last shipping days for guaranteed holiday delivery, that may lead to a spike in messages.

Planning ahead can mean different things to different businesses. For your team, it may mean securing a budget to hire temporary holiday support staff to boost customer satisfaction (which we’ll get to.) Or creating a dedicated DACI model to align on social customer care. Or talking to the merchandising team about peak sale periods to prepare your agents.

2. Create holiday-specific FAQs

According to the 2023 Sprout Social Index™, 54% of marketers plan to use customer self-service tools like FAQs to scale social customer care. Add holiday-specific FAQs to your site, chatbots (more on that below) or even post captions so customers can find answers themselves.

No matter how many FAQs you provide, you’ll always get repeat questions. Amazon, for example, uses pre-written answers for repeat questions to save time and help its team stay less stressed during peak holiday times like Prime Day.

Creating one source of truth for these quick responses ensures consistency. For example, using the Sprout Asset Library, you can quickly search for and select pre-written answer templates as you respond to a question on social.

And if you want to limit or expand permissions, you can easily adjust who can access the Asset Library within Sprout.

3. Staff up

No matter how early you prepare for the holiday rush, even the best planning can’t replace the need for extra hands on deck. Consider hiring temp or additional staff. For example, Al’s Sporting Goods hires seasonal customer service staff to handle holiday demand and ensure they maintain service quality.

Speed is key. The quicker your new staff can hit the ground running, the smoother your holiday season will be. Ensure you provide training and tools that make onboarding a breeze. For example, Sprout has earned industry recognition as a platform with high ease of use, setup and admin—crucial elements when you need to get new staff into a tool fast. And with features like Cases and Case Management, you can assign and triage messages so your team can respond to every incoming message, without duplicating efforts or losing meaningful customer context in the process. With robust customer service case management strategies and tools, you can further streamline collaboration even as your team scales.

4. Tackle the highest-priority customer questions

Ensuring the highest-priority messages are sorted and answered quickly is crucial. Think: complex issues, urgent product inquiries, complaints or even valuable positive feedback needing acknowledgment.

Sprout’s Sentiment for Messages capability lets you identify and sort messages based on whether they’re positive, negative or neutral and create separate inboxes based on these sentiments. This empowers you to identify opportunities for proactive engagement—especially important for developing deeper audience connections, like in this conversation with Rare Beauty.

Teams managing a high volume of inbound messages should also consider a sophisticated triaging tool, like Sprout Social’s Case Management solution. Its smart automation capabilities remove the manual effort and monotony from assigning and creating cases, ensuring that your care teams can get to work quickly, provide the right level of care and avoid disruptions.

Inbound message tagging is another way to get the most out of Sprout’s Smart Inbox and Case Management solution. An organized tagging strategy helps you create tailored inbox views, ensuring quicker responses and improving your ability to analyze customer interactions once the holiday rush is over.

Make sure all your customer care agents—seasonal or otherwise—are up to speed on your strategy with thorough documentation. If you’re not tagging messages in Sprout already, here are potential use cases to consider:

• Tag by urgency: If your agents are divided by support tiers, tagging messages by urgency can help ensure customers are connected to the right representative quickly.
• Tag by customer concern: Understanding trends in customer questions and complaints (e.g., in relation to specific themes or products) can better prepare you for next year’s holiday season. Use the Cross-Network Tag Performance report (which analyzes recurring themes across customer inquiries) to report on questions by internal Tag.
• Tag by response need: Some messages aren’t actionable. For example, if someone promotes their own services in your replies, you’re better off ignoring it. Tagging non-actionable messages lets your team focus on important customer interactions and helps you more accurately measure your agents’ time to first-response (TTFR) rates.

Use these tagging strategies individually or in combination to streamline customer service response and reporting efforts. By proactively tagging inbound messages and Cases, your team can provide excellent customer service no matter how many messages you receive this holiday season.

5. Use automation and AI

An impressive 81% of marketers say AI has already had a positive impact on their work, according to the Index. And it’s undoubtedly front-of-mind for teams wanting to ensure customer service efficiency this holiday season. When you can’t get an extra headcount to lessen the burden on your team, there are ways you can use AI as an assistant during busy seasons.

Here are two stand-out areas where automation and AI customer service tools can make a difference:

Faster responses

While consumers still feel torn on how brands should use AI, most agree on one use case: using AI to improve customer service. A Q1 2024 Pulse Survey found that almost 74% of consumers agree they’re comfortable with brands using AI to deliver faster customer service on social. There will always be customer questions that go beyond your prepped FAQ answers. And fresh responses take time.

Sprout’s Enhance by AI Assist, for example, uses generative AI to improve your responses to social comments and DMs–tailoring replies by length or the tone you want to convey, like friendly or professional to ensure responses align with your brand voice.

Lean on chatbots

If you’re not already using chatbots to lighten your team’s load, this is your sign to start. And if you are, this is your sign to update them with holiday FAQs like order deadlines and promotional offers to keep responses accurate and reduce wait times as customer inquiries increase.

To address basic holiday customer service questions faster, we recommend using Sprout’s Bot Builder. Sprout’s Bot Builder lets you easily customize rule-based chatbots to handle a variety of holiday inquiries, from order tracking to shipping deadlines

These rule-based chatbots also manage common questions that come through Meta’s Messenger or X (formerly known as Twitter) Direct Messages.

To start, determine what conversations you want your chatbot to handle. If you need help, Sprout comes equipped with a customer care-specific Bot Template, which you can tailor to handle holiday-specific questions, like return policies or gift card information.

6. Give agents the context they need to succeed

To set your team up for success through the holidays, you must provide them with the right information and tools. This also means giving agents the customer context they need, such as recent interactions and order history, to provide personalized service.

If your team has to juggle multiple tools just to handle a single customer message, you’re slowing down response times and frustrating both your team and your customers. Plus, your team may miss important customer history.

Sprout supports social CRM integrations with tools like Salesforce, eliminating the need to bounce between systems. You can access details from each platform in a single interface, so you can get a better understanding of the customer you’re supporting, the issue at hand and what’s been done so far to help.

For example, Sprout’s Salesforce integration helps you use social data for a world-class, omnichannel care experience. It enables your care teams to meet customers where they are vs. sending them to other channels, like a phone line or email.

And now with Sprout’s social data in Salesforce’s internal AI assistant, Agentforce, care agents have message history accessible in a matter of seconds to speed up case resolution time, personalize responses and enhance customers’ overall experience.

An integrated social support strategy can make a major difference when dealing with a high volume of social messages. Connecting Sprout throughout your tech stack paves the way for more exceptional support experiences for your team and customers.

7. Establish collaboration norms

Creating a frustration-free, collaborative environment can look different for everyone, depending on your company’s needs. Before you design a process, you first need to evaluate existing and potential points of friction to address them proactively.

If you’re new to prioritizing social as a customer care channel, here are some questions to consider:

Who will review responses from seasonal agents and new hires?

Monitoring responses from new agents is time-consuming but necessary at the start of a busy season when quality control is especially important. Establishing a structured message approval process ensures customer interactions meet brand standards, even with new or seasonal agents.

To build an approval process, first identify which agents can be responsible for approving messages. Pair them with newer agents to ensure all replies stay compliant and on brand. As new agents feel more comfortable in their role, they can handle issues without an approver.

Sprout’s Reply Approvals workflow streamlines the process, allowing agents to submit, review and approve responses without interrupting their workflow to boost team efficiency during peak seasons.

You can also create user teams in Sprout to ensure conversations and message comments are fielded to the right people for replies or clarification.

Who should agents go to with questions?

Whether all tough questions go through a single individual or you have point people for specific issues, documenting responsibilities for various topics and ensuring agents know exactly where to direct their questions.

Bonus: Great customer service strategies aren’t built in a vacuum. Use this free social media customer service training deck to align marketing and service teams around a defined set of shared goals.

Get the deck template

To further reduce confusion, use Sprout’s Conversations feature. This centralizes team conversations within the Smart Inbox, so questions can be answered without extra emails or direct messages back and forth.

8. Capture feedback and performance metrics in real-time to constantly improve

To refine your holiday customer service strategy, you must be able to capture real-time feedback and performance metrics to make continuous improvements. Externally, customer feedback surveys are critical to seeing the big picture of how people feel about their service.

Add surveys directly on social platforms like Instagram to capture feedback where customers are most engaged. Using Sprout, it’s easy to configure and implement surveys that measure Customer Satisfaction Score and Net Promoter Score on Instagram, Facebook and X—three major platforms for customer engagement—to gain insight into customer loyalty and satisfaction levels.

Internally, analyzing customer service metrics—like reply time and messages answered—fills in the details behind why customers may feel a certain way about your service by pinpointing bottlenecks.

In Sprout, the Inbox Team Report lets you easily measure team effectiveness and performance—from a bird’s eye view and by individual team members. This report breaks down metrics like median first reply times and unique messages replied to, taking the guesswork out of refining your customer care process so you can head into the holiday season prepared and confident.

‘Tis the season to be efficient: Master your holiday customer service strategy with Sprout Social

A strong holiday customer service strategy has a long-lasting impact on customer satisfaction and loyalty that continues long after decorations have been put away for the season.

The folks on the front line of your brand play a pivotal role in resolving customer concerns and building loyalty that endures. Equipping your team with the right tools ensures they can focus on delivering top-tier service—the kind that drives repeat engagement, clicks and purchases.

Luckily, Sprout can keep your customer care team in good spirits well into the new year. Get started with a free 30-day trial and spread holiday cheer, empowering your team to delight customers all season long with exceptional customer service during the holidays.