How to balance speed and quality customer service

It’s not enough to resolve customer service issues quickly anymore. Businesses need to meet their customers with the personalized service they’re accustomed to from brands across industries and channels. Like how the barista at your neighborhood coffee shop asks you “the usual?” when you walk in the door.

But departmental silos, limited understanding of the value of social customer care and clunky tech stacks hinder businesses from delivering quality customer service. Leaders who don’t invest in solving some of these issues will be leaving money on the table and putting their customers’ loyalty up for grabs.

In this article, you’ll read how AI and automation technologies are transforming the landscape of social customer care. And how brands, like yours, can take advantage of them to build memorable brand experiences and maintain customer loyalty.

What customers expect from your service: quality and speed

In a world where social DMs have become a form of texting in their own right, brands replying quickly to customers is table stakes. This makes speed a critical performance metric in social media customer care.

As modern customer expectations shift heavily toward immediacy and accessibility, so have the number of customers who turn to social media for prompt responses and solutions. According to our 2024 Social Media Content Strategy Report, customers across generations—Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X and Baby Boomers—are using social media for customer care.

It makes sense, then, that one of the ways brands can amp up customer care quickly and effectively is to make social customer care an integral part of their overall customer service.

Yet, consumers want more than just a fast response.

The 2023 Sprout Social Index™ found that even though 69% of customers wanted brands to respond within 24 hours, and 16% within minutes, 63% of consumers said their brand loyalty hinged on the quality of customer service they received on social media.

As social platforms become the preferred channel for inquiries and complaints, brands need to keep up with the speed of social and provide swift, effective solutions. It’s especially critical today, when social customer care has such a huge impact on the entire service experience, influencing customer satisfaction, loyalty and brand reputation.

Luckily, technology is here to help.

AI and automation tools are enabling brands to meet customer expectations without missing a beat like never before. And consumers are welcoming the move. According to a Sprout Q1 2024 Pulse Survey of 2,000 consumers across the US and UK, 75% say they’re comfortable with brands using AI and automated technology to deliver faster customer service on social.

And with social becoming a key place for customers to sound off, care teams deserve all the support they need to scale and meet customers’ high expectations.

Read more about how top brands provide exceptional customer service and support.

Common roadblocks to delivering high-quality customer service

Though 88% of business leaders agree social media is a critical tool in providing customer care and service, several roadblocks prevent teams from accessing the tools and resources they need.

Here’s how social media marketers and care teams describe their greatest challenges to delivering exceptional customer care and experiences.

Too many messages and too much manual work

According to a Q3 2023 Sprout Pulse Survey, 63% of customer care professionals said a high volume of customer care requests is their most prominent obstacle.

As one member of The Arboretum, Sprout’s online community for social professionals, put it, “The most significant challenge I face when managing customer care on social media is the expectation to be available to answer questions 24/7.”

Meeting customers’ high expectations is something all brands are struggling with. Customer care tools can take the pressure off by automating tedious or repetitive tasks and managing cases based on priority, so care agents can act more effectively. Yet, only 30% of marketers feel their brand actively engages with customers on social and has implemented customer service tools and processes. And 71% of business leaders agree that brands don’t have a strong social media strategy for customer service.

Departmental and technological silos

Per the Index, social customer care is a shared function between marketing and customer service teams in 2024. But shared ownership means reimagining your teams’ entire approach to collaboration.

From your tech stack to your internal workflows, brands need to pressure test each stage of the social customer care process to find out where silos are slowing service down, and where there’s too much strain on one team.

For example, social teams are often not equipped to handle complex customer service needs, but they’re often asked to do so anyway.

As one member of The Arboretum described, “A social media manager doesn’t have the resources to resolve every customer complaint. Customers use social more and more for issue resolution, but there’s a solid wall between customer care (which uses traditional communication channels) and social media engagement.”

Others agreed that collaboration between teams at their org is lackluster. “Our team’s inability to provide quick and effective customer care is due to the lack of timely interdepartmental communication,” says one social marketer.

Lack of training and education

Social customer care is a relatively new domain, with most teams struggling to keep up with best practices. These gaps are often the product of social customer care being thought of as an ancillary duty rather than a business-wide priority.

As one member posted in The Arboretum, “There is a lack of recognition that social media ‘counts’ as customer service and care. Engaging with customers and your audience through comments and DMs doesn’t get the same respect or regard that dealing with customers through email, phone or in-person channels often does.”

Brands must ensure their care agents get the social media customer service training they need. This will help them better understand the nuances of providing care on social and delivering brand-friendly customer service across key social networks. In fact, our Q3 2023 Sprout Pulse survey found that 35% of businesses planned to hire additional agents and host additional training to improve the quality of customer interactions on social going forward.

While social customer service teams understand that social customer care is key to resolving issues on channels where customers provide open, honest—and very public—feedback, educating key stakeholders and senior leadership is also necessary to help them see its impact.

Not having the right tools

The lack of investment in customer care processes and tools to actively engage on social is a major hurdle to developing a sophisticated strategy. Disjointed tech stacks and disparate communication channels can make social customer care cumbersome and inefficient.

The Q3 2023 Sprout Pulse Survey revealed many organizations’ most prominent challenges stem from technology breakdowns—48% are left with manual tasks that take up significant time, 41% have gaps in available customer care intel for agents to reference when handling requests and 26% cite a lack of technological resources.

An Arboretum member describes how not having the right tools impedes quality: “Customers appreciate personalized responses that address their specific concerns. However, doing this effectively on social media, where conversations can be disjointed and context may be lost, can be difficult.”

According to the Index, 50% of marketers plan to implement advanced social media management software to streamline workflow efficiency. This suggests leaders are aware that technological investments are crucial to crafting a cohesive customer experience. With social becoming the central hub for social customer care functions—not just for posting and reporting, but for direct customer engagement—brands must invest in social media customer service tools.

How to provide high-quality customer service, fast

What it takes to deliver memorable and positive customer experiences is changing. As customer expectations evolve, so too should the best practices your teams follow and the processes and tools you use.

These are actionable steps to overcome challenges and meet customers where they are.

Use AI and automation for support

Per the Sprout Social Index ™, 81% of marketers said AI positively impacted their work, citing benefits like more time for creativity (78%) and increased efficiency (73%). Another 47% plan to use AI to handle basic customer inquiries in 2024 and beyond.

Thoughtfully using AI for customer service can help brands reallocate care teams’ time so they can handle tasks more efficiently. Plus, AI can help improve direct responses and meet audiences with more authenticity and human connection.

For example, our Enhance by Assist capability helps customer service agents enhance the tone of their responses to match the customers’.

AI and automation also improve customer care workflows. Sprout’s Case Management solution enables your team to automatically create Cases for each social message that needs a reply—and route them to the right team or individual based on custom criteria and rules.

Each team in Sprout has access to a distinct queue, where they can see all incoming messages assigned to them and key details about each Case. Teams can access Cases via a specific pane in the primary navigation menu.

In addition to our Case Management solution, Sprout also has a Smart Inbox, where all incoming messages from across social channels are visible in one single stream. The inbox also includes other tools that empower your team to resolve issues faster, with AI-enhanced agent replies that make replying fast and easy, tags that allow for efficient sorting and filtering and bulk actions to quickly triage messages.

And, Sprout has rules-based chatbots to help expedite customer service for common scenarios, too. Here’s an example of how automated chatbots can be set up to help automate repetitive conversational tasks (like gathering information), resolve customer issues at a faster rate and provide 24/7 service, even when no agents are available.

Personalize the experience

Consumers don’t want to be thought of as one of thousands (or millions) of people who receive the same canned response. They want to be seen as a VIP who deserves an experience that meets their unique needs.

Truly resolving customer issues and personalizing care starts with finding meaningful data. And this requires integrating social with other business intelligence software like your CRM. By having a centralized, 360-degree view of your customers, you’ll increase the quality of service you provide and break down departmental silos.

This data will deliver key insights about your customers, from the first time they sent you a DM to the last time they made a purchase. As our Q3 Pulse Survey data revealed, about 38% of customer care leaders are already looking forward to consolidating agent and customer data to guide business decisions.

Sprout enriches your Salesforce CRM records with social data to provide a comprehensive view that enables your team to engage in real time with the right context. Notice how the sidebar is populated with Salesforce Service Cloud data in this example of an agent responding to a customer via the Smart Inbox.

Similarly, brands can also use Salesforce’s internal AI assistant, Agentforce, to surface data from within Salesforce faster, so customer care agents have a complete view of a customer’s history to provide exceptional care.

Agents can prompt Agentforce to pull up a customer’s case history and quickly see what they’ve reached out about previously, for additional context, and offer thoughtful, personalized support.

Sprout’s Tableau Business Intelligence Connector takes it a step further by combining social data in an omnichannel view with other marketing data. By harnessing this intel, customer care and marketing leaders can work together to align on the business value of social customer care and elevate it into strategic planning conversations.

Use social data to understand what your customers care about

The best customer care is proactive. Understanding what your customers care about, the common issues they’re having and how they feel about your brand will shape your brand’s care strategy.

According to our Q3, 2023 Pulse Survey, 23% of customer care leaders count an inability to make data-driven decisions among their most pressing challenges, and another 37% are eager to adopt social media management tools that increase the value and business impact of customer care.

By using a solution like Sprout, you can use AI to uncover critical customer insights. Automatically sift through billions of data points to zero in on trends and key learnings you need to guide future strategy. For example, find out how your customers are reacting to your latest product launch through sentiment analysis within our Listening tool. Then, use that data to train your team and inform future product development.

Be an example of high-quality customer service

As the volume of messages and mentions you receive on social rises, so too will customer expectations of your business. To stand out from the competition, invest in the right training, processes and tools to provide quality customer care and propel your business forward.

Audit the tools and processes your organization currently uses to find gaps and redundancies. Build the case for shared ownership of customer care and access to social data, and identify the new skills you and your team need to lead a robust social care strategy.

Dive into this 2024 interactive guide on modern customer service to see the untapped potential of social for customer care and how you can benefit from it.