Looking for proof? Look no further than Instant Brands. The company is home to an iconic portfolio of seven kitchenware brands including Corelle, Pyrex, Instant Pot and more. Managing customer service for such a diverse range of beloved business units demands continual innovation driven by consumer insights. To achieve this, Instant Brands has embraced a top-notch approach to social media customer service.

Social Media Manager, Camille Pessoa, is the driving force behind Instant Brands’ social customer service initiatives. She partners with Maggie Lowman, who is responsible for managing the content aspect of Instant Brands’ social media strategy. Together, they work to create a consistent feedback loop that empowers each team to deliver on a customer-obsessed strategy.

“The collaboration between our departments is vital for the business,” says Pessoa. “Working this closely together is how we achieve the success and goals that we strive for.”

We spoke with Pessoa and Lowman to get the inside scoop on what makes their approach to collaboration between marketing and customer service work. In this guide, you’ll find tested advice on aligning both teams to support better customer outcomes.

• Why your marketing and customer service departments need to work together
• How to align marketing and customer service teams
• 3 ways marketing and customer service can work together
• How Instant Brands’ customer service and marketing teams stay connected with Sprout Social

Why your marketing and customer service departments need to work together

In a competitive market, the only way to win is to be customer obsessed. When marketers collaborate with customer service teams, they get unparalleled insights into the driving forces behind customer experiences. Grounding marketing strategies in customer feedback elevates initiatives big and small.

But what’s in it for customer service teams?

According to Lowman, it’s rich social insights. “Social media is a direct line to your consumer. One of our main goals is obviously to provide consumer value, and they’re telling us what they want on social every day. By the way that they interact with us, by the comments and complaints that they leave—it’s really valuable information.”

If that doesn’t make the case, don’t worry—we’re just scratching the surface. Here are three more benefits businesses gain from close collaboration between customer service and marketing teams.

It’s what consumers expect

What it takes to meet consumer expectations is changing. In the past, providing superior customer service was a speed issue. But, as customer experience standards continue to rise, so does the need for high quality, personalized care on social.

The latest Sprout Social Index™ found that 76% of consumers notice and appreciate when companies prioritize social customer support, and the same percentage of consumers value how quickly a brand can respond to their needs. To do both of these things well, marketing and customer service teams need to stay in constant contact.

It helps each team reach their respective goals

Increasing the flow of customer feedback and insights between customer service and marketing teams elevates the performance of both functions.

When a support channel as critical as social lives solely in the hands of marketing, customer service teams are forced to take a more reactive, inefficient approach to providing customer care. Maintaining service level agreements across channels starts with removing data silos with shared tools and resources.

Marketing teams stand to benefit along the same lines. “Our social customer service team catches content issues quickly,” says Lowman. “For example, if a link isn’t working or there’s an error in the copy, they’re able to alert us quickly so that we can make the changes that are necessary to ensure a better customer experience.”

It surfaces opportunities for surprise and delight

More than half (51%) of consumers say the most memorable thing a brand can do on social is respond to customers. By involving your customer service team in social engagements, you have the opportunity to elevate this even further.

When customer service and marketing teams work together, they can better identify and act on opportunities for surprise and delight. For example, when a member of the Instant Pot Facebook Group shared that her beloved appliance had been destroyed after a hurricane, the Instant Brands team was able to get to work quickly to send her replacement, along with their well wishes.

“This person said that they had been using their Instant Pot almost every night for years,” says Lowman. “Our Facebook Group is over three million strong. If we weren’t taking the time to go through all the comments and conversations we get daily, we wouldn’t have gotten to have that very sentimental and important engagement with our customer.”

How to align marketing and customer service teams

Making the most of every customer care opportunity begins by strengthening the bond between your marketing and customer service teams. As your working relationship deepens, it will become easier for both parties to identify new ways to wow customers.

If you want to make cross-functional collaboration a well-worn reflex for all your team members, we’ve got four tips to help you along the way.

1. Align on shared goals

When you’re just beginning to build connections with colleagues from other teams, it can feel like they’re speaking a different language. Everything—timelines, rituals, commonly used phrases and acronyms—can feel utterly foreign, even though you all work at the same company.

Aligning on goals is the fastest way to break down the barrier. Once teams are looking at a shared goal, all the work that goes into getting there makes a lot more sense.

For Perssoa’s team, social media response time is the top priority. “I work with a team of six moderators that rotate in for 24/7 service. We try to maintain an average first response time of four hours for general engagements, and one business day for reviews.”

There’s also quite a bit of quality assurance work that goes into ensuring all conversations meet the Instant Brands standard. “I usually pick three conversations at random, then analyze them against our customer service rubric,” says Pessoa.

These goals enhance outcomes for both teams, giving everyone something to rally around. When customer service teams are able to meet and exceed their service delivery standards, marketers reap the benefits of heightened customer satisfaction.

2. Assign roles and responsibilities

Businesses without dedicated social customer service teams often face bottlenecks when it comes to managing social media engagement. Marketers are typically equipped to handle standard issues and frequently asked questions, but more complicated inquiries can gum up processes for both teams.

To successfully navigate these complex issues, you’ll need to outline clear, cross-functional roles and responsibilities for the channel. By 2024, the majority of companies anticipate social customer care becoming a shared responsibility. Adopting a responsibility assignment matrix—like the Responsible Accountable Consulted Informed (RACI) model, for example—can put your team ahead of the curve.

Of course, there’s no one size fits all approach to defining these roles and responsibilities. For maximum efficacy, they need to be tailored to your business. If you’re having trouble determining what that might look like, here are some thought starters to guide your approach:

• On average, how many messages do you receive across your social profiles per month? Does your social team have the capacity to handle those messages? If not, what percentage are they able to resolve on their own?
• What are the most common types of questions, complaints or comments your team receives on social?
• What situations often call for case escalations on social? In your current processes, when do you tap in your customer service team for help?

Once you’ve answered these questions, you can outline how you’ll approach customer service tiers on social. For instance, if you get a large amount of tier zero requests through social channels, it may be time to make the case for a customer service chatbot tool. This empowers customers to resolve issues independently, aligning with their preferred time for outreach.

3. Eliminate data silos

Now that you have your roles and responsibilities outlined, it’s time to ask the tough questions. How will your social team pass cases over to their colleagues in customer service?

Findings from a Q3 Sprout Social Pulse Survey reveal the biggest challenges customer care professionals face when providing service on social media are largely related to routing. These hurdles revolve around the significant time invested in manual tasks and the insufficient access to comprehensive customer information for agents.

To address these challenges, the same Pulse Survey found 45% of customer care leaders intend to invest in integrated technology that enables their teams to collaborate within unified systems. It’s a solution that Instant Brands has relied on to limit confusion when working between teams.

“We use Sprout Social to manage our social customer service strategy,” says Pessoa. “It allows us to address issues in a single platform, rather than having to switch between email or Microsoft Teams to resolve a case.”

4. Create spaces for collaboration and information sharing

A refined approach to social customer care is achieved through ongoing two-way feedback between customer service and marketing teams. As team members become more familiar with their roles in the process, it’s crucial to provide them with spaces to surface opportunities for improvement.

At Instant Brands, that looks like a shared channel on their business communication tool, along with a weekly 30 minute meeting. “Our Microsoft Team’s chat is crucial,” says Lowman “It keeps Camille and I, along with a few others on our team, connected. We use it daily to bring up questions, concerns and other items our teams need to work together on to address.”

It also gives Pessoa and her team a chance to provide direct feedback on Instant Brand’s social media content strategy.

“We tailor our strategy based on consumer demand,” says Pessoa. “If we see there’s an opportunity to educate our consumers on a common product-related question, we pass the opportunity over to marketing so they can create content around that specific question. It creates a strategy that’s more aligned with consumer needs.”

According to Lowman, this approach creates a measurable win-win for both teams. “Say we have 300 customers asking how to do a water test with their Instant Pot. We can make a how-to video and put that out on social media. We typically see really strong engagement from this type of content because it’s informed by our customer care team.”

3 ways marketing and customer service can work together

Building a strong partnership between two teams is an ongoing commitment that requires routine checkpoints. If you set it and forget it, chances are your teams will too. Avoid this fate by nurturing collaboration between your marketing and customer service teams using these three field tested methods, courtesy of Instant Brands.

Shared reports

Lowman had always shared social media performance updates during a monthly meeting. However, these updates were specific to the marketing end of the channel. Without the customer service perspective, stakeholders only got a fraction of the story. Combining reports told a bigger picture—one that allowed them to capitalize on new opportunities.

“Combining reports helped us a lot early on in our relationship,” says Lowman. “When we pulled in Camille, she was able to add a new layer that explained what our consumers are talking about, where their frustrations are, what common pain points are coming online—things like that. It brought a new layer of value into our monthly meeting.”

Shared resources

Brand guidelines, promotional calendars, strategy briefs—the resources that keep marketing team members on the same page can also do the same for your teammates in customer service.

“Simple things, like getting an advanced look at the marketing content calendar, can make a world of a difference,” says Pessoa. “It gives my team time to identify opportunities or flag issues. We get so much value from that proactive exchange of information.”

This holds particularly true for social media. Think about it: the content you share can significantly impact the number of service inquiries you receive on the platform.

For example, this TikTok on the do’s and don’ts of owning an Instant Pot received over 505,000 views.

It’s an incredibly helpful piece of content that was bound to generate quite a bit of engagement. Without a proper heads up on when and where it would be published, the Instant Brands social customer service team wouldn’t have been prepared to address the 100+ comments received on the video.

By collaborating with your customer service team, you provide them with an opportunity to review scheduled content for clarity. Leveraging their firsthand knowledge of customers, they can proactively address potential issues before they arise.

Shared tools

While eliminating data silos may seem like an obvious choice, the reality is that investing in new shared tools takes a lot of work. It involves the challenge of aligning stakeholders on priorities and the complex task of integrating new and existing systems—no easy feat, indeed.

However, it’s important to remember that connected tools lead to reduced operational hassles for teams and result in superior customer experiences. You simply can’t argue with those results. Just ask the team at Instant Brands.

“Customers talk about us on social media all the time, and that can be positive or negative,” says Pessoa. “What matters is that we address them as fast as we can. That’s why Sprout’s integration with Salesforce is so crucial for us. It keeps us connected with the service agents that handle escalations so we can extinguish fires with minimal risk.”

By investing in a social media management platform that integrates with Salesforce Service Cloud, the Instant Brands team is able to get the most out of both tools. It’s an investment that benefits everyone—leaders, agents and customers.

How Instant Brands’ customer service and marketing teams stay connected with Sprout Social

Social media operates at the intersection of brand marketing and customer service, serving as the thread that weaves these two disciplines together. The channel’s role in connecting both teams underscores the importance of a unified social media management tool.

For this purpose, Instant Brands chose Sprout Social. Here are the tools that drove their decision:

Cases foster in-platform collaboration

Some customer questions are best suited for tenured agents who have a better understanding of the nuances of your business. Others may require additional context from another team—like brand or legal. Cases allow agents to delegate messages to a specific team member along with all the helpful context needed to set them up for success.

“We use Cases all the time,” says Pessoa. “Not just for interacting with marketing, but also for interactions between our moderation team as well.”

With Cases, team members across Instant Brands can resolve issues without having to navigate between disparate platforms. Team leads can also measure the number of cases being assigned and completed, along with other critical customer service metrics, from the Case Performance Report.

Tags break down the trends in common social media support requests

Tags are a Sprout feature that act as labels you can attach to any piece of content you plan to publish, or any inbound messages received in the Smart Inbox. Using Tags allows you to filter social media reports to identify themes across your outbound publishing and inbound messages, enhancing your social media insights.

“We divide our Tags into three categories: information, support and sentiment,” says Pessoa. “Then, under those umbrellas, we have all sorts of specific Tags. For example, we have an information Tag for influencers that reach out, a support Tag for potential damage claims, a sentiment Tag for customer advocacy. We get very granular.”

“This helps us zero in on what consumers are asking and what we need to address—either internally with customer service or through content with marketing.”

Social Listening extracts actionable insights from conversations across social

Teams across Instant Brands use Sprout’s Social Listening tool to extract insights from across social. This simplifies and expedites the process of analyzing the conversations and trends related to their full portfolio of brands and within their industry.

“It’s so important for us to know what consumers are saying about each specific brand,” explains Pessoa. “We use listening to automatically generate reports that are shared with our leadership team so we can all share an understanding of what consumers are talking—or complaining—about.”

Social media listening also surfaces interesting product use cases from across the social-sphere, which helps the Instant Brand marketing team come up with new content ideas. “We see so many interesting use cases for the Instant Pot,” says Lowman. “It gives us a birds-eye view of the general customer landscape.”

Sprout’s Salesforce Service Cloud integration supports superior care for high touch issues

You can only take social customer care issues so far in a public forum before you need to escalate things to a private channel. Without an escalation management strategy in place, you risk customers sharing sensitive information—like home addresses, phone numbers and account information—in a non-secure environment.

Sprout empowers teams to provide seamless, omnichannel care through our global partnership with Salesforce. As Salesforce’s preferred social media management solution, we offer deep out-of-box integrations that allow Salesforce customers to do more with their social media data.

“We’re always generating cases with Sprout for Salesforce. We get quite a few requests for Instant Pot and Pyrex—usually things like requests for replacements or product defects. To solve those issues, we need to be able to ask for consumer information which has to be done in Salesforce.”

Customer service and marketing teams do better together

When marketing and customer service teams join forces, they create a positive impact that can benefit an entire business, from sales to product and beyond. But the biggest winner in this partnership is the customer, which makes it even better.

For additional insights into the consumer preferences shaping the future of social media, check out the latest Sprout Social Index™. Inside, you’ll discover valuable data to enhance your approach to social customer care.

The post Field tested tips for aligning customer service and marketing appeared first on Sprout Social.

But every social network is different, their user demographic is unique and not all comments, such as trolling, deserve responses. Knowing how to interact with audiences on different social platforms and respond to various kinds of comments is crucial to a successful social communications strategy.

In this guide, we help you navigate through different approaches for a variety of social comments and show you the best way to respond to them.

Why responding to social media comments is important

According to The Sprout Social Index™ 2023, 51% of surveyed consumers say the most memorable brands on social respond to customers. It’s no surprise that prompt responses also help nurture customer loyalty and elevate brand satisfaction.

Further, 68% of customers follow brands on social to stay informed about new products and services, another 46% look for exclusive deals and promotions. That’s why responding to queries diligently and providing relevant responses can lead to better sales conversions.

Positive comments feel great and give you a chance to further boost your brand reputation. And, while nobody likes negative comments, they have the potential to give you in-depth insights into your brand strategy so you can prioritize areas that need improvement to enhance customer satisfaction.

Similarly, responding to neutral comments is a great way to let customers know you hear them and are in tune with them. This fosters closeness and nurtures your brand community.

With this in mind, let’s get to know different types of social comments and how to approach them.

How to handle different types of social media comments

Social media comments can oscillate between positive and negative emotions but you can’t afford to ignore either because they’re vital to your conversions. According to a Q4 2023 Sprout Pulse Survey of 1,623 consumers, 65% of customers reach out to brands on social with questions about products and services before making a purchase. The way you respond can impact a potential sale. These comments are important for tracking brand sentiment as well so you know how audiences perceive your brand.

Here’s a look at how to handle different types of comments common in social media marketing.

1. Positive comments or feedback

Responding to positive comments is an important part of building and maintaining a positive brand image. When a customer thanks you or shows appreciation, it’s best practice to reciprocate the feeling.

Be sincere in your response, thank them for their time and remember to personalize your message. These gestures show how much you value and appreciate their feedback. It also helps build a sense of trust and community.

2. Neutral comments

Neutral comments can be tricky because you may think they don’t require a response. Yet, responding to such comments builds brand loyalty because it shows you’re listening to your audience and available whenever they need you to be. It also gives you an opportunity to engage with your audiences in a fun way.

3. Negative comments

Negative comments can be about a range of issues revolving around products and customer care. Responding to such comments with tact and empathy is vital to maintain brand health. A respectful, calm and personalized approach can turn a disgruntled customer into a happy one, and potentially earn repeat business.

While some negative comments may be general complaints, some need to be handled more carefully so they don’t escalate. It’s best practice to have an escalation management protocol in place to handle such cases smoothly so they don’t turn into bigger issues. More on that later.

Analyzing sentiment in social media comments

By measuring brand sentiment from positive, negative and neutral social media comments, you can monitor and analyze how the market perceives your brand in real-time. This helps you proactively track brand health and take corrective measures where needed. Sentiment analysis insights also enable you to spot your strengths and weaknesses to inform product and business strategies for more holistic growth.

For example, Sprout’s AI-driven sentiment analysis capability enables you to analyze sentiment in keywords and hashtags across social platforms like Instagram, Twitter and YouTube to understand customer satisfaction so you can improve their experience. You can also get a competitor comparison of key performance metrics across social networks such as engagement, impressions, share of voice and user sentiment all in a unified stream.

Conversational analytics from social media comments further let you dig into social chatter about you and your competitors. It helps you monitor competing brands and spot market trends and topics that interest your audience.

Navigating responses to tough comments

There’s a difference between negative comments and hate speech—comments that aggressively attack a brand or an individual. Similarly, common complaints like late deliveries or late customer care responses are not the same as those that can turn into a potential PR problem. These need to be handled differently.

Offensive comments and hate speech

In such cases, it is important to maintain calm and professional candor and remember that trolling is meant to provoke and upset. You must set boundaries for inappropriate behavior and make it clear that dehumanizing language, personal attacks, hate speech and offensive language are not acceptable. You may also block the person and report it on the social network.

Comments related to a crisis

Social media comments related to a crisis may cause serious repercussions to your brand and require a comprehensive crisis communication plan. It’s necessary to handle issues that could adversely affect your reputation with a potential PR or legal backlash. Being prepared with a social strategy to manage a crisis helps you jump into action immediately while ensuring you’re following your company’s legal and brand protocols.

In such cases, it’s important to keep records of interactions and feedback garnered from social comments and DMs. Document screenshots of relevant comment threads and send them to your HR, legal and other stakeholders as required so everyone is on the same page. This is necessary to develop an effective plan to handle the situation successfully. Using Sprout, you can also create a unique Tag to label DMs and posts that fall into this category. Then you can use Tag reporting to simplify how you share information with those across the organization.

How to respond to social media comments

Every social media network is unique by way of its demographic and how customers use it to interact with brands, especially for customer service. Audiences use social for customer care because they can reach a brand instantly while, according to McKinsey, brands benefit from being able to provide higher customer satisfaction at lower costs. That’s why mastering how to respond to comments on different social networks is essential to enhancing customer experience.

Let’s look at how responding to comments organically works on each social network.

1. Facebook

Facebook remains a thriving social network where audiences go to discover and engage with content that resonates and to stay updated on the latest trends. It’s also where people go to interact with a brand and in return expect brands to engage with them authentically.

In a fast-paced world where customers are spoilt for choice, being attentive to your customers is key to building lasting relationships. Whether it’s a positive, negative or neutral comment, responding to them builds genuine connections and lets your customers know you appreciate them.

To make sure you don’t miss a comment, click Inbox in the left sidebar of your Facebook Page manager. Access comments from there and click Reply to respond.

2. X (formerly known as Twitter)

Customers love X for its real-time, bite-sized content format that allows for quick and easy conversations. That’s one of the reasons why it’s so popular forcustomer service. Customers voice their concerns with brands, share opinions and engage in discussions freely, and before you know it, there’s a trending hashtag.

When you respond to social media comments on X, it’s important to remember that they’re visible to all and there may be others following your conversation. You must be timely and polite, even when facing complaints. This gives you an opportunity to highlight your brand personality and elevate brand perception by showing how gracefully you handle customer issues.

To respond to a mention onX, click on the comment bubble icon at the bottom of the post. A pop-up will appear for you to type out your response. Click Reply to write your message and Send.

3. Instagram

Customers often use Instagram to browse products, ask clarifying questions and make purchases. In fact, Instagram is built to encourage purchases. The network’s Product Tags feature enables you to highlight your products directly in your videos and posts so customers find them easily and get all the information they need. Here is where they might also be interested to know more about specific products or deals. That’s why monitoring and responding to comments on Instagram regularly is important for your brand.

Apart from being prompt in your responses, it’s also ideal you show interest in customers by acknowledging neutral comments. This nudges customers to consider your brand during a purchase, nurtures your relationship with them and builds your reputation as a brand that’s appreciative of its followers.

To view your Instagram notifications, tap the heart icon in the top right corner of your app. Click on the comments you want to respond to and you’ll automatically see the post. Tap Reply to respond to the comment. If you want to leave a response on someone else’s post, tap the comment bubble icon directly below the photo and you’ll reach the comments page. Type your comment and tap Post to send.

4. LinkedIn

Responding to social media comments on LinkedIn is different from other social channels. Since it’s a platform geared toward professionals, you need to respond in a friendly but formal manner. Acknowledge comments by liking them and express your thoughts succinctly in your response.

To comment on LinkedIn posts, click on the Comment option under the post and type your message in the box that appears. To reply to someone else’s comment on your post, open the post, click on the comments and tap on Reply to respond.

5. Pinterest

People use Pinterest as a visual search engine and often draw inspiration or discover new products. In fact, 80% of weekly users have found a new product or brand on the network. While commenting may not be as common as other interactions on the platform, audiences can see comments that have been left on their Pins.

Use this opportunity to provide relevant information and answer queries about your products and respond to feedback.

To view comments left on your pins, click on the megaphone icon. Click Reply underneath the comment to leave your response and tap Enter. To leave comments on other Pins, open the Pin, click Comments and type in a message.

6. TikTok

TikTok is a fun social network to bring out your creativity and boost your brand presence, audience reach and engagement. The best part? You can experiment with different types of content and don’t have to be formal while interacting with customers. Choose how you want to write in keeping with your brand voice, keeping it light and friendly.

That said, TikTok comments are great for understanding what your audience wants and expects from you. Monitor conversations and engage with your followers to keep up with audience sentiment and see what aspects of your brand are most popular with them.

To view comments on a video, tap the comment bubble icon on the right side of your screen and reply to the comment and a a Reply to [username] text box will appear.

Streamline social media comments with Sprout Social’s Smart Inbox

Monitoring and engaging with social media comments on all your different social channels can be a daunting task. Sprout’s Smart Inbox enables you to unify all your social streams into a single source of truth so you easily monitor incoming messages, quickly respond to audiences and efficiently manage conversations.

It enables you to prioritize messages by tagging, filtering and hiding completed messages in your inbox so you don’t miss out on a single comment. Review your messages to find the most urgent ones and respond to comments across platforms from one app. Plus monitor keywords, hashtags and locations to discover unique engagement opportunities.

Start managing your social media comments

An​​ effective communication plan to engage and respond to social media comments empowers you to build your brand, foster brand loyalty and connect with the right audience. Boost your brand reputation where it counts and navigate critical moments that can adversely affect your brand. Check out our social communications plan template to plan for all possible scenarios on social and tackle your social strategy more efficiently.

The post Your guide to social media comments: How to post and respond appeared first on Sprout Social.

Just as snowy decor starts appearing before Halloween has even arrived, your holiday customer service strategy must be ready ahead of peak shopping season. 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 and team up for success.

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. So much so that 74% of US and UK consumers say they’re likely to reach out to a brand on social this holiday season, according to a Q4 2023 Sprout Pulse Survey of 1,623 consumers.

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. Instagram reports that 70% of shoppers look to the platform for their next purchase. And Facebook has the highest number of social commerce buyers.

Social media is a virtual mall designed for product discovery, social proof and purchasing all in one place. And consumers know this, too—55% of consumers say they rely on brands’ social media accounts when it comes to discovering and learning about new products during the holiday season, according to our Q4 2023 Pulse Survey.

Social media must be at the center of holiday customer service because it’s at the center of shoppers’ gift hunt. Outfitting your team with the training and customer care social media tools they need makes it easier to meet customers where they are.

Customer outreach on social media will surge during the holiday season

The most wonderful time of the year is also the busiest time of the year for customer service agents. 63% of consumers strongly or somewhat agree that they are more likely to reach out to a brand on social during the holiday season vs. the rest of the year, according to our Q4 2023 Pulse Survey. And our data shows that this outreach most frequently comes through via direct messages and in-post comments.

If your customer service team isn’t seeing (let alone responding to) customer questions and comments on social, they’re missing the chance to build customer trust and loyalty. Over half of consumers say that the most memorable brands on social is simply respond to customers, according to the most recent Sprout Social Index™.

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.

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

From asking about restocks and order status to sharing glowing reviews, customers use social media along every step of the purchasing journey. Asking product questions and sharing positive feedback were the top two motivators for consumers to contact brands via social, according to our Q4 2023 Pulse Survey.

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 does more than just answer questions. It can convert prospective customers into lifelong customers and brand advocates. At the same time, a strategy that doesn’t account for social has the power to do the opposite.

8 tips for enhancing your holiday customer service strategy

Holiday-related spikes in support requests can be stressful. But the right process and tools can empower your team to rise to the challenge.

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

Like we said, the holidays feel like they start earlier every year. If you’re not planning ahead for the holiday surge, you’re already falling behind.

The last thing you want during a busy holiday season is to play catch up. So plan ahead to cover all of your bases before the “season’s greetings” decor goes up in stores.

Consider the other milestones your agents should align with—think: key dates for holiday marketing, like sales and launches, that may lead to a spike in messages or tools they need to learn.

Planning ahead can mean different things to different businesses. For your team, it may mean securing budget to hire temporary holiday support staff (which we’ll get to.) Or creating a dedicated RACI model to align on social customer care. Or talking to the merchandising team about when certain sales will start and end to prepare your agents.

2. Create holiday-specific FAQs

According to the Index, 54% of marketers plan on using 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 will always get repeat questions. Prepping pre-written answers to common questions your team can pull from saves everyone time.

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, you may simply need more hands on deck. Consider hiring temp or additional staff. E-commerce brand Threadless hires additional holiday customer service staff every season to provide additional support.

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 Tasks, where you can assign specific messages to specific Sprout users, you can further streamline collaboration even as your team scales.

4. Employ a system to tackle the highest-priority customer inquiries

Ensuring the highest-priority messages are sorted and answered quickly is crucial. Think: complex issues, time-sensitive or negative inquiries, even positive comments that warrant a swift response.

Sprout’s Sentiment for Messages capability lets you identify and sort messages based on whether they’re positive, negative or neutral, and create 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 Calvin Klein.

Inbound message tagging is another way to get the most out of Sprout’s Smart Inbox. An organized tagging strategy can help you create tailored inbox views, triage customer questions and report on your efforts once the holiday season wraps up.

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 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. Creating a unique Tag for messages that don’t warrant a response can help you more accurately measure your agents’ time to first response (TTFR) rates.

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

5. Tap into 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.

Here are two stand-out areas where automation and AI customer service tools are a game changer:

Faster responses

There will always be customer questions that go beyond your prepped FAQ answers. And fresh responses take time.

AI tools create a starting point for responses that your team can build off of, minimizing effort—having these tools baked into your current workflow streamlines your process further. Sprout’s Enhance by AI Assist, for example, suggests AI-generated responses for you to choose from and customize when responding to social comments and DMs. You can even select the tone you want your response to convey.

Lean on chatbots

If you’re not already using chatbots to lighten the load for your team, this is your sign to start. And if you are, this is your sign to update them with holiday FAQs.

To address basic holiday customer service questions faster, we recommend using Sprout’s Bot Builder. These rule-based chatbots can 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 can be adjusted to suit your needs.

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 providing agents with the customer context they need to succeed.

If your team has to toggle between multiple tools just to respond to one customer message, you’re doing your team and audience a disservice. Plus, your team may miss important customer history.

Sprout supports social CRM integrations with a number of tools, like HubSpot and Salesforce, eliminating the need to bounce between systems. Details from each can be accessed directly within the Smart Inbox 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 empowers users to leverage 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.

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 the needs of your company. Before you design a process, you first need to evaluate existing and potential points of friction.

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. 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’ll be able to handle issues without an approver.

To manage approval processes in Sprout, use the Reply Approvals workflow to submit, review, approve or reject messages directly within the platform, minimizing disruptions for all parties involved. 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 who’s responsible for what topics can help prevent confusion and frustration when dealing with social messages.

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 feedback and measure performance. Externally, customer feedback surveys are critical to seeing the big picture of how people feel about their service.

Add surveys directly to your social platforms for customers. 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.

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. 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 strong.

‘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 that continues long after decorations have been put away for the season. The folks on the front line of your brand have the power to alleviate customer concerns and earn their loyalty. Providing your team with the right tools can free them up to focus on creating exceptional customer experiences—the kind that drive repeat engagement, clicks and purchases.

Luckily, Sprout can keep your customer care team in good cheer well into the new year. Start a free 30-day trial and help bring more joy to your agents and customers this holiday season.

The post Prepping your social customer care team for the holiday rush with Sprout appeared first on Sprout Social.

Within minutes, Samsung responded and helped me slide into their DMs to investigate my case further. The agent (Nick) was kind, knowledgeable and connected me with the right team to solve my technical issues. And when Samsung didn’t hear back from me, several days after my TV was working again, they even reached out to make sure my case was truly resolved. The entire experience was fast, seamless and demonstrated just how much Samsung cares about its customers.

As consumers, we celebrate the brand experiences that are prompt, personalized and make us feel valued by the brand. And according to the latest Sprout Social Index™, 76% of consumers notice and appreciate when companies prioritize customer support. It’s not enough for brands to just engage with customers before and during the buying process. Consumers want to be surprised and delighted at every step of their journey, and brands that deliver on those expectations can turn someone into a life-long customer.

While today’s business leaders don’t need to be convinced of social customer care’s value, they do need to answer who in their organization should own those efforts. But the reality is that social customer care requires the input and collaboration of multiple teams. For shared ownership to be productive rather than chaotic, everyone who touches social customer care needs to be on the same playing field.

Social customer care is everyone’s responsibility

Considering how social supports nearly every facet of the customer journey, brands recognize the need for social customer care to be treated like a team sport rather than the responsibility of one owner. According to the latest Sprout Social Index™, only 24% of businesses say social customer care will be exclusively owned by marketing or customer service teams in the future.

Historically, it used to be that whoever owned the keys to a brand’s social channels was responsible for effectively addressing customer inquiries, concerns and feedback. Social media managers would attempt to juggle their own marketing priorities while also serving as the liaison between consumers and service teams. Consider this familiar scenario: A customer asks a question on social, the social media manager emails or Slacks the service team, then responds back whenever they have an answer. Sometimes customers are redirected away from social entirely and asked to repeat the details of their situation via a form or other channel. As a result, the responsibility is placed on customers, with resolution times spanning days instead of a couple hours.

Now imagine that same scenario where the marketing and service teams are working in harmony. Service agents don’t have to wait for social marketers to triage messages in order to resolve customer complaints. Likewise, social marketers can focus on activities that best harness their expertise instead of chasing down answers that could be easily addressed by the service team. It’s this collaboration between teams that enabled Casey’s, for example, to increase their response times by 90%, ensuring their customers always have a positive experience when communicating with the convenience store chain.

Expecting one team, or one person, to manage every online consumer interaction sets your brand up for failure and ignores how customers actually want to engage. But coordinating stakeholders across multiple departments to align on one cohesive customer care strategy presents its own set of challenges. The more players you have contributing to social customer care, the more essential it becomes to have a sophisticated playbook that keeps everyone in sync.

To scale, you need the right tools and workflows in place

Collaboration between teams is just one half of the social customer care equation. You also need the tools and processes to effectively engage with your customers on social, something only 30% of brands have invested in. It’s not enough to hand the keys to social over to your customer service agents—or pull your social team into your helpdesk platform. Everyone needs to be able to access and act on the right information without relying on others for direction. Here’s why:

• Increased efficiency: With a central solution, brands can achieve economies of scale because your team builds expertise on one tool rather than multiple point solutions—reducing time spent training and onboarding team members later. An intuitive customer care platform can streamline the workflows between marketing and service teams by democratizing access to social data and insights. Increasing transparency across teams makes it easier to see who is handling what, reducing miscommunications and ensuring every interaction is properly addressed. Atlassian, for example, utilizes Sprout’s Tagging capabilities to quickly assign tasks to the right teams and always keep conversations with customers moving.
• Stronger risk management: A shared social customer care platform also helps brands mitigate reputation risk because all teams get the full view of what’s taking place on social. Complaints made on social are publicly accessible by other customers and competitors, and we’ve all seen what happens when a post about a bad customer experience goes viral. With a unified tool that gives all teams a window into what people are saying about your brand, social media marketers and customer service agents can shut down reputation nightmares before they spiral out of control.
• Top-line growth: Finally, consolidating your social customer care tools gives brands an opportunity to transform their customer care strategy from a cost center into a growth engine. When brands can maintain a 360-degree view of their customer, they can use those insights to surprise and delight audiences at scale and salvage potentially negative experiences. With the right context and the right teams in place, even inquiries about a defective product or order gone wrong can transform into an immediate or future purchase.

There’s no “I” in social customer care

If social customer care is a team sport, it’s not enough to have one superstar taking all the shots. You also need a deep bench of people and resources to stay a step ahead of the competition. Brands need to implement tools that enable teams to access the data they need to respond effectively, while also putting insights into the hands of those working to improve the overall customer experience.

At the end of the day, your customer isn’t concerned with who responds to them—only that you do so in a timely and meaningful manner. While those standout customer moments do require the full cooperation of multiple teams, it doesn’t have to come at the expense of simple workflows or solutions. By eliminating silos and democratizing access to social across their organization, brands can consistently deliver personalized service that keeps customers loyal for life.

For more data on how brands can evolve their social customer care approach to stay ahead of the competition, download the Sprout Social Index™, Edition XIX: Breakthrough.

The post Social customer care is a team sport—are you all in? appeared first on Sprout Social.

There are countless places for consumers to sound off. From shout-outs to call-outs, brands need a pulse on many channels to keep a clean reputation. When done right, monitoring can uncover low-hanging ways to improve your overall business. Below we dig into the key steps involved in online reputation monitoring and why it matters.

Table of contents:

• What is online reputation monitoring?
• How is online reputation monitoring done?
• What are the benefits of online reputation monitoring?
• What are online reputation monitoring tools?
• Reputation monitoring software to try
• What features to look for in a reputation management software

What is online reputation monitoring?

Online reputation monitoring is how brands oversee and analyze their digital reputation. The “monitoring” piece looks at actual feedback from your audience. This feedback can identify customer sentiment (positive or negative), trends and more.

Although reputation management is synonymous with review sites (think: Yelp! or G2), it goes far beyond that. Monitoring your digital reputation involves a wide variety of channels, including:

• News and earned media
• Forums (especially Reddit and Quora)
• Social comments and discussions
• Videos (think: YouTube)
• Third-party review sites and review aggregators

How is online reputation monitoring done?

Although we might think of “monitoring” as a passive process, it’s honestly anything but.

The reality? Monitoring requires active listening and timely action. In fact, this applies to your big-picture reputation management strategy. Planning ensures that you don’t miss crucial conversations among your target audience.

While there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to monitoring, here’s a breakdown to get you started:

Identify the platforms to monitor

Reputation monitoring goes far beyond your owned channels.

Most brands are already watching their social mentions, review listings and direct feedback channels. These are all priorities but they aren’t the be-all, end-all of your online reputation.

So much of online reputation management means monitoring channels where you aren’t active.

For example, B2B brands focused on LinkedIn or G2 may be oblivious to discussions on Reddit. These are the candid conversations that are eye-opening but often fly under the radar.

Don’t make assumptions when it comes to where you think your customers hang out and talk. Consider how many platforms people bounce to and from on the path to purchase. Translation? Online review management involves taking a holistic view of the platforms you track.

Scope the terms, hashtags and keywords to monitor 

No surprises here. You can’t actually do reputation monitoring until you figure out what you want to watch for.  For most brands, this means analyzing a combination of phrases and hashtags including:

• Branded searches (ex: “Sprout Social” or #sproutsocial)
• Product-related keywords and phrases (ex: “social media management software”)
• Industry and product-related terms (ex: “social listening”)
• All of the above as it relates to competitors and alternative products

But with the stakes so high, these are not words and phrases you should guess.

Through social listening, brands can see firsthand what people are actually saying. This includes specific terms and language. You can likewise look at your SEO strategy to find additional terms to monitor. When in doubt, consider talking to your sales and customer success teams as well. These conversations can reveal timely and trendy terms used by your audience.

Analyze your reputation over time

Pop quiz: does your brand have the reputation of an industry leader? How do people feel about you versus your competitors? What do you do well and where could you improve?

These questions can all be answered based on conversations that are already happening.

Granted you’re monitoring them.

Again, monitoring requires being both attentive and proactive. Tracking conversations relevant to your brand needs to be consistent and scalable. A consistent approach provides an up-to-date understanding of your reputation and ways to improve it.

This is where something like social media sentiment analysis can really save the day. For example, Sprout Social identifies conversations and key terms illustrating how your audience feels about you. The good, the bad and everything in between.

Linking it all together with a reputation monitoring tool

Realistically, businesses can’t track each and every digital conversation manually. There are too many channels and opportunities to miss crucial touchpoints with a DIY approach This speaks to the need for dedicated online reputation monitoring tools for your tech stack.

What are the benefits of online reputation monitoring?

Keeping a pulse on what people are saying about your brand might be a no-brainer.  However, the value of comprehensive reputation monitoring can’t be overstated.  From positioning and messaging to your content and product, there’s so much to gain by leveling up your monitoring being direct mentions. Let’s take a closer look at the benefits below.

Increases brand awareness through listening

The more people shouting you out, the better. The more data you can gather, too.

Integrating reputation monitoring in your marketing strategy is about more than just keeping a pulse on your brand. It also fosters a culture that encourages more conversations about you.

This represents a sort of snowball effect. More mindful monitoring means more conversations which translates into more brand awareness. This is especially true for brands that take the time to authentically reply and engage with their audiences.

Think about how brands frequently respond to reviews and feedback in public. These interactions do double-duty of building visibility and putting your brand in the best light possible.

Effective monitoring enhances customer relationships

This is the big one.

Online reputation monitoring isn’t all about “me, me, me.” Not by a long shot.

For starters, effective monitoring can uncover strengths and weaknesses when it comes to how you serve your customers. This might include lag times in customer care or figuring out that your customers at large might not understand a feature of your product.

You can likewise uncover new opportunities to delight your dedicated customers (see below).

Gain a competitive advantage by tracking trends

Reputation monitoring is invaluable for the sake of competitive analysis. Tracking relevant industry and product-related conversations can help you understand:

• Product features (or new products) that outshine that of your competitors
• Areas where you could be more effective (think: customer care, onboarding)
• Shared frustrations and pain points among your target audience
• Terms associated with your brand and product to feature in your marketing messages (think: “easiest” or “fastest”)

For example, the word cloud generated by sites like G2 can be eye-opening. These pros and cons could inspire future content, product features and more.

Brands quite literally can’t afford to just watch customer feedback roll in and not react. This applies to both positive and negative sentiments alike. This is an example of how effective reputation monitoring can uncover actionable ways to boost your business.

Avoid and prevent social media crises before they take off

Monitoring involves a lot of sifting through noise. Done right, you can see trends that point to bigger-picture issues and opportunities.

For example, a sudden flood of negative reviews could be a sign of a total social media PR crisis. Being able to monitor these issues before they have a chance to snowball is massive.

This drives home how online reputation management involves action in addition to listening.

Empower the rest of your organization with timely data

The benefits of a strong reputation trickle down to the rest of your team (hint: not just marketing).

Illustrating positive sentiment via reviews makes it easier for your sales team to actually sell.

Likewise, your custom success team can gain insights to understand who’s happy and who might need additional support.

What are online reputation monitoring tools?

Online reputation monitoring tools help brands aggregate and analyze brand-related conversations. Review management software is among the most common tools in brands’ stacks for monitoring reputation.

But again, conversations relevant to your reputation go far beyond managing Google reviews.

All publicly available data is fair game. Comments, forum posts, podcast mentions, you name it.

And so all of the above should factor into your reputation monitoring.

Why do businesses need software to monitor online reputation?

Reputation monitoring should be integrated into your marketing stack, plain and sample.

However, no brand should invest in a tool “just because.”  Let’s look at reasons why so many brands are upping their investment in reputation tools.

There’s such a wide variety of networks to monitor 

This bears repeating! Tracking social platforms like Instagram, TikTok and Facebook is just the beginning. This doesn’t account for forums and other places where crucial conversations happen.

Monitoring every corner of the Internet “by hand” isn’t realistic. Gaining the most complete perspective on your brand’s reputation requires a tool to gather, source and analyze that data.

You need to consolidate your notifications and alerts

Anything you can do to keep yourself from bouncing between platforms is a plus. Having cross-platform alerts and notifications in one place can do the trick. Ideally, your reputation monitoring tool should integrate seamlessly with the rest of your tech stack.

You need to identify trends based on actual data

With the right online reputation management tool, you can turn qualitative information into quantifiable data. Marketers are rightfully obsessed with metrics and numbers related to reputation are among the most actionable for brands.

For example, brands can course-correct with confidence by analyzing an uptick of negative sentiment. On the flip side, you can boost messaging and marketing based on positive sentiment.

Reputation monitoring software to try

Consumers are spoiled for choice when it comes to providing feedback about brands.

And similarly, brands are spoiled for choice when it comes to reputation monitoring software.

That said, the abilities of any given monitoring tool vary greatly from app to app. For example, many free tools are able to highlight mentions but don’t provide in-depth sentiment analysis.

To illustrate a few options, check out this quick list of reputation monitoring software solutions.

Sprout Social

Sprout’s suite of reputation management tools makes it a cinch to both gather and analyze feedback related to your brand. Powerful social listening combined with a consolidated, collaborative inbox means you never lose track of those crucial conversations. Meanwhile, in-depth reporting and analytics via social listening are a treasure trove of insight.

Social Mentions (by BrandMention)

Free apps like BrandMention’s Social Mentions tool can serve as an introduction to reputation monitoring. The app’s results are more focused on mention volume and sources but also offer basic sentiment analysis.

SentiOne

AI-powered listening tools like SentiOne can help marketers understand sentiment from social media, YouTube comments and beyond. The platform specializes in insights and reporting related to large data and improving customer care.

Birdeye

Birdeye takes reputation management a step further by analyzing positive comments and also automating outreach messages to turn those comments into “official” reviews. The tool can also identify trends and provide a competitive analysis of your company versus others based on sentiment analysis and key terms.

Google Alerts

Google Alerts is arguably among the most basic but also easy-to-use tools for monitoring online reputation. The platform allows you to set up real-time alerts for specific topics and aggregate mentions over time to deliver via email or RSS feed. 

Online reputation monitoring features to look for

The monitoring features that makes the most sense for your brand largely depends on your needs.

That said, reputation management tools are most effective when they seamlessly integrate with your existing marketing tech. Juggling multiple monitoring apps doesn’t make sense for the sake of saving time. You likewise risk getting a fragmented understanding of your reputation.

Below we highlight the must-have features for reputation monitoring software in general.

1. Collaborative workspace

Again, reducing platform-hopping should be a priority for brands. Having your reputation analysis side-by-side with your other marketing tools makes it easier to make interventions. This includes responding to a social shout-out or a negative review. The ability to collaborate in one space means that your team can also work swiftly to intervene without stepping on anyone’s toes.

2. Reporting and analytics

Reporting is crucial for marketers in the era of accountability. Putting your customer feedback into context ensures that you’re tracking relevant activities and customer phrases. The ability to conduct regular sentiment analysis is especially important to understand the impact of your marketing efforts.

3. Multichannel notifications

When responding to hundreds (or thousands!) of reviews, a review management tool that offers various notification settings is key. Bonus points for software that provides the option of delivering notifications in real-time and across channels.

4. Integration with your CRM

Chances you or your teammates are already doing a lot of heavy lifting in your CRM.  Review monitoring goes hand in hand with your pipeline and revenue tracking to create a unified hub for managing customer and prospect activity. Not to mention improve your customer care strategy.

5. Artificial intelligence and automation

Like it or not, artificial intelligence can play a crucial role in reputation management. Automating activities including sentiment analysis and social listening provides a deeper understanding of pain points and customer needs than is possible manually.

How to take your online reputation monitoring to the next level

Maintaining a strong online reputation starts with monitoring and taking action.

Social listening and review management should be top priorities for brands of all sizes. This is especially true as social media becomes the go-to place to conduct product and brand research.

With an in-depth tool that aligns with your existing martech, you can understand and analyze your brand’s reputation with confidence. If you haven’t already, test-drive Sprout Social and its suite of online reputation tools that can help.

The post Online reputation monitoring: What it is and why it’s important for business appeared first on Sprout Social.

The modern consumer is looking for more than just a good deal—they want brands they can trust. They want brands that consistently provide superior customer care experiences that adapt alongside their changing preferences. Once that trust is secured, businesses can reap the benefits.

If you want to keep your hard-earned customers for the long haul, keep reading. In this article, we’ll delve into the fundamentals of brand loyalty and how to cultivate it. We also gathered three examples of brands that have excelled in fostering loyalty to inspire your own strategy

• What is brand loyalty?
• What are the five characteristics of brand loyalty
• How to build brand loyalty that lasts
• 3 brand loyalty examples to inspire your approach

What is brand loyalty?

Brand loyalty describes a consumer’s inclination to keep choosing a specific brand, even in the face of competitive offers or challenges. This loyalty is often a result of the value a brand offers to its consumers. For example, superior customer experiences drive more loyalty.

In that sense, these brand-consumer bonds are similar to everyday relationships. Think about it: Lasting friendships aren’t formed after a single trip to the movies. Instead, they evolve gradually as two individuals spend more time together.

The same goes for brand loyalty. It develops over time as a brand shows its commitment to customer service and satisfaction.

Brand loyalty vs. brand affinity: What’s the difference?

Brand affinity is the belief that a business aligns with the values or principles of its customers. While brand loyalty refers to the actions consumers take with a specific brand, brand affinity encompasses the emotional ties between consumers and a brand.

So which is more important? The answer is both. Brand affinity drives brand loyalty by forging deeper connections between a brand and its consumers. Similarly, brand loyalty can drive brand affinity through positive word-of-mouth recommendations.

Take Stanley, for instance. Their now famous Adventure Quencher Travel Tumbler achieved viral fame on social media, particularly resonating with Millennial and Gen Z women.

This viral success triggered a chain reaction, leading to both greater brand loyalty and brand affinity. The tumbler transformed into a lifestyle accessory that strongly resonated with specific audiences. This resonance, in turn, fostered loyalty.

Why brand loyalty matters

According to The 2023 State of Social Media Report, the top priority for business leaders in today’s economic environment is building brand reputation and loyalty.

As market competition heats up and consumers become pickier about what they buy, brand loyalty helps ensure that your product or service doesn’t end up on the chopping block. The loyalty of your top customers is what keeps them from being tempted by other offers, acting as a protective shield that prevents competitors from chipping away at your market share.

What are the five characteristics of brand loyalty?

Now that we’ve covered the why, let’s get into the how. A customer’s brand loyalty is made up of five distinct characteristics that inform how they engage with your brand.

Emotional connection

Have you ever gone out of your way to get to your favorite coffee shop? It feels silly, but the emotional attachment between a person and their favorite beverage is no joke. It’s your favorite for a reason.

Maybe their service is incredibly consistent, or maybe they nail emotional marketing plays that speak to being cozy and comfortable. Whatever it is, it’s created a personal connection that has fueled a lasting relationship.

Resistance to competition

Brand loyalty makes customers less likely to be swayed by competitive offers because they believe the value your brand offers is greater than anything a competitor can provide.

After several positive experiences with their chosen business, brand loyalists view that brand as more valuable. They’re confident that the brand will consistently meet their needs and offer better quality, which makes them less inclined to explore other options.

Positive word-of-mouth

The greatest influencers are often our co-workers, family members and friends. That’s what makes positive word-of-mouth recommendations so powerful.

It’s not uncommon for brand loyalists to sing the praises of their preferred business, and their love isn’t restricted to casual conversations either. Digital word-of-mouth recommendations are also common, and can look like:

• Social media shout-outs and praise
• User-generated content
• Positive reviews
• Brand ambassadorship

Tolerance for price changes

Inflation. Supply chain issues. Market headwinds. Price changes are often the outcome of several contributing factors that businesses have little to no control over.

If yesterday’s price simply can’t be today’s price, brand loyalty can be a helpful buffer against price sensitivity. This allows brands to adjust pricing to maintain profitability without losing their most loyal customers.

Repeat purchases

The four characteristics we’ve covered thus far work together to encourage repeat purchases and customer retention.

Nothing encapsulates this phenomenon quite like the “If I like it, I’ll just grab it in a different color” TikTok trend. After the audio (originally shared by user @justsaraslife) took off on the platform, more than 39,000 people used it to show their dedication to the brands and products that they love.

That’s the power of brand loyalty. It keeps people coming back, even if it’s for the same thing.

How to build brand loyalty that lasts

There are plenty of marketing tactics that companies use to improve brand loyalty, including rewards programs, having a strong brand story, community building and more.

Let’s go in-depth on some of the best ways to build brand loyalty that lasts.

1. Provide best in class customer service

The quality of customer service a brand offers plays a huge role in driving brand loyalty, which is proven to have a significant impact on your bottom line. Research from McKinsey shows that customer experience leaders achieve more than double the revenue growth of customer experience laggards.

Turning your business into a leading brand starts with a well-documented customer service strategy that accounts for your audience’s preferred channels.

For example, if you get a high volume of customer service requests on social media platforms, you should make sure resources are allocated toward monitoring those accounts and responding in a timely manner. You can use a social media tool like Sprout Social’s Smart Inbox to help different team members quickly delegate and assign each social media message as it comes in.

Sprout’s Inbox not only lets you assign tasks to individual team members, but you can also enable approval permissions so that these critical messages are reviewed for brand voice and tone before they’re published.

It’s critical to establish these workflows, no matter who your audience is. Social media interactions are entirely public facing, meaning their impacts extend beyond the individual who requested support. Acknowledging your customers on social media—whether they’re giving praise or feedback—builds trust, and in turn, brand loyalty.

2. Find your brand voice and story

Create a unique voice that represents your brand and makes it feel approachable to people in your audience. Maintaining a consistent brand voice across all channels will make your brand more recognizable and memorable.

Fitness apparel and accessories brand Gymshark does this by taking a more informal approach to their social content. Instead of creating like a brand, they post like fitness content creator.

Their relatable memes and jokes do more than just get a chuckle out of their target audience. They help to humanize the brand by establishing a unique personality across different platforms. This personality creates emotional connections based on feelings of happiness, support and shared interests.

3. Use rewards programs

If you want to incentivize your audience to return to your website or shop with you again, a great strategy is to create a rewards or loyalty program. These programs typically offer discounts or coupons to repeat shoppers. Brands that give extra perks to their loyal customers can encourage more and larger sales down the line.

Starbucks has virtually gamified its rewards program in a way that makes its customers excited to use it. The Starbucks Rewards Card and app make it easy for customers to get their Starbucks order and collect perks along the way.

Starbucks also rewards people who aren’t necessarily repeat customers. Their birthday rewards and different holiday promotions are ways to spread awareness among less frequent customers and incentivize future visits with discounts and free items. They use social media to promote their rewards program and get new customers in the door.

Starbucks is an example of taking a rewards program to the next level with its extensive app, but even a punch card towards a free item or a discount will encourage repeat customers. Use social media to raise awareness on the value of your in-store programs, so customers know it’s available.

 4. Build a brand community

As more people turn to digital spaces for connection and conversation, brand communities present a major opportunity for businesses looking to cultivate loyalty.

The rise of community platforms and vertical social networks call back to a time where the internet was solely for connection and conversation. People ask questions, provide feedback, cheer each other on—it’s behavior that’s unique to what you’d find on your main feed.

Brands that create their own communities can unite their fans to benefit from this high-quality engagement.

To see what this looks like in practice, check out Sephora’s Beauty Insider community. Every day, thousands of makeup fanatics turn to their fellow Beauty Insiders for advice, recommendations and more. Community groups (like “Nailed It” and “Best Hair Ever”) allow community members to dive deeper into specific interests with other knowledgeable shoppers. It’s a place where questions are answered and friendships are forged.

All this activity creates a win-win scenario for Sephora and its customers. Customers receive round-the-clock advice and support from fellow fans, and Sephora gets a never-ending well of customer insights and feedback.

5. Use social media insights to keep up with your customer preferences

On social, brands can use clever combinations of copy and visuals to dive deeper into every facet of their brand identity. The channel is unparalleled in its near-constant opportunities to humanize your brand. 

To put it simply, social is where your brand comes to life. 

Using social media to build brand loyalty means telling a story worth your audience’s investment. It’s not enough to share product releases and business announcements. You need to hone in on what resonates with your target audience, and deliver on that message as creatively as you can. 

Gas and grocery chain Casey’s stays in lockstep with customer interests by using Sprout Social’s Post Performance Report to analyze content performance at a granular level. Sprout’s analytics tools help the Casey’s social team identify trends in content performance, so they can create content that resonates with audiences across their 16 states of operation.

Brands can replicate this approach by crafting a data-driven social media marketing strategy that prioritizes both quantitative and qualitative customer feedback. Test new messaging and creative assets often. Your findings can ensure that your brand continues to appeal to new audiences while maintaining and cultivating greater loyalty with existing customers.

3 brand loyalty examples to inspire your approach

It’s easy to see when a company is getting brand loyalty right. After all, their satisfied customers are often the first to sing their praises through rave reviews and repeat purchases. If you want to add your brand to those ranks, here are three lessons from businesses that excel in cultivating brand loyalty.

1. Le Creuset

How much bakeware could one person possibly need? To Le Creuset fan, the limit does not exist.

For nearly 100 years, the French kitchenware brand has been a mainstay for chefs and home cooks alike. Obtaining your first Le Creuset Dutch oven is a momentous occasion for many, but it doesn’t stop there. Fans continuously flock to seasonal releases, hoping to get their hands on the latest and greatest in enamel-covered dishes.

So what makes these dishes so special? Quality aside, the brand taps into its audience’s emotional needs.

The art of cooking is already deeply rooted in care and connection, giving Le Creuset an easy in to their audiences hearts and minds. Layer in their reputation for reliability along with some cozy visuals of simmering pots and delicious meals, and you get a diehard fan base of brand loyalists.

Takeaway: How do you want your brand to make people feel? Zeroing in on the emotional pull of your brand and product can set the foundation for future, long-term brand loyalty.

2. Marks & Spencer

How do you reinvent a brand that’s more than a century old? That’s the question Marks & Spencer, a UK-based retailer specializing in clothing, beauty and home products, had to answer in 2019 after dropping from the FTSE 100 for the first time since the city share’s index began in 1984.

Fast forward to today and you’ll see a company back on the up, largely due to an omnichannel customer experience strategy that creates cohesion across its many offerings.

To bring the brand into the digital age, Marks & Spencer introduced an app-based loyalty program in 2022. The program, called Sparks, treats loyal customers to gifts, prizes, personalized offers, charitable donations and more.

Source: Marks & Spencer

The M&S team came up with these benefits by listening to audience feedback and experimenting with incentives to get them in-store—and so far, it’s working. More than 4.3 million active users turn to the Sparks app to stay connected with the retailer.

Takeaway: Boost your brand loyalty by creating a customized program that matches your audience’s interests and desires. When you actively connect with your customers, you’ll uncover ways to strengthen loyalty that go beyond occasional discounts.

3. Slack

Brand loyalty isn’t exclusive to B2C brands, and Slack proves it.

Over 100,000 organizations use the business messaging tool to connect their workforce, and professionals across industries swear by it. While the product itself is impressive, what truly sets the company apart for many fans is its unique voice and tone.

Slack seizes every opportunity to reinforce its brand’s distinctive voice. When you interact with them online, they come across as your favorite coworker—friendly, smart and genuinely human. According to their brand microsite, their voice is at the core of their brand identity, and they approach everything with genuine warmth and care, even their app release notes.

These small, thoughtful touches surprise and delight their audience, making the Slack brand feel more relatable and earning them even more loyalty.

Takeaway: If you want to build meaningful connections with your loyal customers, ditch the business speak in favor of what sounds real and relatable. Root your approach in customer-centricity and refine as you go.

Tap into the power of brand loyalty

Turning your customers into loyal advocates isn’t about fancy marketing gimmicks or viral campaigns. It’s about reinforcing the core strengths of your business and reliably offering excellent products and services. When you earn your customer’s trust, their loyalty is sure to follow.

As your loyal customer base expands, you’ll naturally build a broad network of brand advocates who can help spread the word about your brand, bringing in a fresh wave of customers. And if you’re aiming for even greater success, consider diving into brand advocacy. Your business’s biggest fans might just be your key to unlocking new revenue opportunities.

The post How to cultivate brand loyalty (strategies and examples) appeared first on Sprout Social.

As market competition grows more fierce, consistently delivering exceptional customer care is more vital than ever. Connecting the dots between disparate communication channels—phone, email, chat, social—is a necessary step in future-proofing your business.

However, doing so also means connecting the dots between the people and processes that manage those touch points. A single support request can be routed through several tools and individuals. Your customer service strategy serves as a roadmap for navigating that complexity without strain.

In this article, we’ll go over a step-by-step breakdown of how to develop a customer service strategy that’s both memorable and efficient. Plus, we gathered two examples from brands that are creating stellar customer experiences at scale.

• What is a customer service strategy?
• The importance of a customer service strategy
• A 5-step framework for developing a customer service strategy
• 2 real-world customer service strategy examples to inspire your approach
• 3 factors influencing customer service approaches in 2024

What is a customer service strategy?

A customer service strategy is a blueprint for delivering on your business’ service standards across multiple teams, channels and tools.

Having a well-planned customer service strategy bakes more consistency into your business operations. Think about it: Customers interact with countless teams and individuals throughout their journey with your brand. A comprehensive customer service strategy ensures that everyone is on the same page, resulting in more satisfactory customer experiences.

The importance of a customer service strategy

A unified customer service approach can empower customer-facing teams to create better experiences at scale. It’s a rising tide that lifts all ships, ultimately resulting in more revenue. Here’s why: 

It drives customer satisfaction and retention

The modern consumer has more options than ever before. Today, securing their loyalty isn’t a matter of keeping their attention. It’s a matter of building their trust.

The only way to build that trust is to consistently meet expectations, which can’t be done without a focused customer service strategy. It provides the structure and order needed to support your team as they strive to meet (and exceed) expectations.

When customers are satisfied, they are more likely to remain loyal, make repeat purchases and recommend your products or services to others.

It connects customer-facing teams

Between customer success, service and social customer care teams, countless individuals drive your customer experience. A well-documented customer service strategy is the connective tissue that unites complex team structures while preventing duplicated efforts.

This level of efficiency has two advantages for your business. First, customers benefit from fewer transfers and escalations, leading to shorter waiting times. Second, support teams can perform their best work without the hassle of internal back-and-forths, creating better agent experiences.

Together, these create a positive feedback loop that continuously drives better experiences for customers and agents.

It builds brand reputation

According to our most recent social media industry report, building brand reputation and loyalty is the top priority for marketers across industries, with 66% of businesses prioritizing it in today’s economic environment.

Businesses that want to increase their market share over the next few years are putting a renewed focus on their customer service offerings–and with good reason. An effective customer service approach builds and protects your brand reputation through the good times and the bad.

When things are going well, you can use audience sentiment data to identify what customers are loving. For example, maybe people really love that your agents take the time to personalize responses. You can use this knowledge to integrate similar personalization techniques into other aspects of your strategy.

If the market dips or a crisis strikes, a positive brand reputation can serve as a shield from lasting damage. Customers who have had positive experiences with your brand are more likely to extend their goodwill and remain loyal.

A 5-step framework for developing a customer service strategy

Developing an exceptional customer service strategy requires intentional collaboration and planning from start to finish. Follow this step-by-step guide to ensure all stakeholders are aligned on the actions that will create better customer experiences.

1. Develop a shared vision for customer service

What does customer-centricity look like at your business? I bet if you ask a few different people, you’d get a few different answers. And you can’t achieve a company-wide customer service goal when every customer-facing team is running at different objectives. That’s why it’s so important to begin this process by establishing a shared vision for your company’s customer service approach.

This is your chance to unite teams around a shared understanding of what your customer experience can and should look like. Kick things off by setting a series of meetings dedicated to align relevant stakeholders around an overarching, channel-agnostic vision for customer service.

Pro tip: To ensure your vision is truly all-encompassing, have teams work together on a comprehensive customer journey map. Be sure to include key details on the following:

• Touchpoints: Where do customers connect with your business across the buyer’s journey and for what reasons? What channels do they use to make these connections?
• Metrics: How are you measuring the quality of these interactions?
• Stakeholders: Which stakeholders own your business’ various communication channels? Who else is involved in these interactions?
• Pain points and gaps: What blind spots exist in your customer experience? What pain points prevent your teams from providing superior customer service? What are customers saying about your service standards?

Use this customer experience audit to serve as a shared place to document findings. The more specific everyone gets, the more effective your customer service strategy will be.

2. Identify key customer service channels and their owners

Go through the list of touchpoints you gathered during the last step and document each channel’s owner. Does each channel have a clear owner? Before you proceed, you’ll need to bring those individuals together to agree on next steps.

Of course, some channel owners are clearer than others. Phone, email and chat support, for example, fall cleanly under the customer service department’s umbrella. Social and community forums, on the other hand, are typically managed by marketing.

Social customer care is a tough nut to crack for many businesses. The discipline sits at the intersection of service and brand marketing, complicated workflows and strategies. According to The 2023 Sprout Social Index™, only 8% of social marketers believe themselves to be leaders in customer care on social media, likely because the function lacks a clear owner.

If social customer care responsibilities span multiple departments within your organization, identify the team leaders who implement those cross-functional workflows. Use a responsibility assignment matrix—like the RACI model, for example—to create clarity around your internal processes before attempting to execute your strategy.

3. Define measurable customer service goals

Come together with the rest of your key stakeholders to agree on a list of broad objectives for your customer service strategy, then align around targeted SMART goals for performance measurement.

In case you’re not familiar, SMART goals are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-sensitive. While each of these characteristics are important, you’ll devote some extra energy to identifying the customer service metrics that will determine the success of your strategy—like average first reply time, response rate, etc. After all, what gets measured, gets done.

Create a shared customer service report to track your team’s performance against their new goals, and set a cadence for routine progress updates. This will ensure accountability and help identify issues early on.

4. Implement workflows that promote speed and collaboration

Your teams can only be as efficient as the tools and workflows that support them. If you introduce new goals without meaningful infrastructure improvements, the only thing you’re setting yourself up for is unhappy customer service agents.

Before you set out to achieve your new service goals, audit the existing processes that govern your support teams. Where are there gaps or redundancies? Are your teams set up to do their best work?

If the answer to that last question isn’t an enthusiastic “yes!”, then it’s time to start tinkering. Talk to agents to zero in on the pain points that prevent superior customer care and adjust accordingly. Even small tweaks—like creating an internal share of approved responses for FAQS—can make a meaningful difference in your time to first reply.

5. Establish a customer feedback loop

Consistently collecting and evaluating customer feedback is the only way to measure the success of your customer service strategy. As you identify opportunities to refine your approach, you set your team on the path of continuous improvement.

Combine progress toward KPIs with qualitative data from review sites and social listening tools to paint an accurate picture of consumer sentiment.

If you’re using Sprout’s AI-powered social listening tools, create a Topic that specifically focuses on your customer care strategy. This will identify any posts related to your brand’s customer service practices, whether or not your brand account is tagged.

Use this feedback to inform iterations on goals, processes and priorities. The more you learn, the better your process will become.

2 real-world customer service strategy examples to inspire your approach

Now that we’ve gone through the step-by-step process of creating a customer service strategy, let’s look at some industry-leading brands setting new standards in service.

Grammarly empowers users through their digital customer service strategy

Each day, over 30 million people and 30,000 teams rely on Grammarly for writing help that goes beyond a quick spell check. If they have an issue with the tool, or even just a question about a punctuation suggestion, they can rely on Grammarly’s robust customer service practices.

Grammarly’s digital customer service approach includes:

• A self-service support hub that helps users troubleshoot common issues on their own.
• An official Grammarly Support X (formerly known as Twitter) account which receives 13,000 messages on average per month.
• A social listening strategy designed to proactively monitor reviews and brand mentions across the web.
• Customer service reports informed by those social listening practices, which help consolidate and distribute customer feedback and insights across Grammarly teams.

Subaru prioritizes making their customers feel seen and heard

Global brands are faced with unique challenges when creating consistent customer experiences, but Subaru makes it look and feel effortless. Their customer service strategy hinges on authentic, real conversations with customers—resulting in one of the most loyal fanbases in the automotive industry.

Subaru transforms service requests into customer care opportunities by:

• Uniting around a shared goal to build lifelong relationships with their customers, from purchase through their ownership.
• Empowering dealership professionals to create positive, consistent experiences throughout the pre- and post-sale experience.
• Incorporating and promoting customer advocacy across their social media presence through their Subaru Love promise.

3 factors influencing customer service approaches in 2024

As channels evolve, so do consumer standards. To stay competitive in your service offerings, it’s crucial to keep a close eye on the factors that shape them. Whether you’re crafting a strategy from scratch or refining what already exists, here are three need-to-know influences on informing the future of customer service.

1. Social media data

Social data is way more than just brand performance metrics. There are real-time customer insights hidden within the billions of social conversations that take place each day. You just need to know where to look.

According to the 2023 State of Social Media Report, 88% of business leaders agree social media data and insights are critical to delivering exceptional customer care. On top of that, 96% expect social data to be integrated into their company’s CRM capabilities within the next three years.

If you’re not proactively considering how you can layer social business intelligence into your customer service strategy, you’re at risk of falling behind.

2. AI and automation

If factoring in another input for your customer service strategy made your head spin, don’t worry. Artificial intelligence (AI) and automation can bring some much-needed order to all these moving parts.

Nine in 10 business leaders agree that increased investment in AI will be crucial for scaling customer care functions over the next three years. An AI-powered toolkit will dramatically speed up your time to insights—allowing teams to iterate on their customer service processes faster than ever.

AI-supported customer service helps businesses scale customer care functions effortlessly through intelligent automation and data analysis. If you want to empower teams to support customers with confidence, this should be a key area of investment.

3. Connected tools

The hallmarks of great customer service are easily identified but hard to execute. Disparate systems make even the most basic tasks a headache for service professionals, impacting their overall ability to provide quality care.

[DATA VIZ – Harris Chart]

Superior customer experiences start with cohesive tech stacks that support a 360-degree view of the customer. Integrated tools centralize customer data, allowing agents to access the context they need to personalize interactions and resolve customer inquiries more efficiently.

Use connected tools to integrate social data into your CRM or help desk solution. Sprout Social offers pre-built connections with your favorite tools—including Salesforce Service Cloud—so your teams can crush silos and increase visibility,

Our integrations equip agents to engage in real-time with the right context. With Sprout uniting your tech stack, you can create an omnichannel experience that informs and empowers your entire organization.

Stand-out customer service strategies start with social

Remember: Great customer service is a team effort. If you build your strategy in a vacuum, you risk overlooking valuable insights that can give you an edge over your competitors.

Connect with your social team to learn more about the social customer service insights that live within your organization. If you want to take things a step further, download The 2023 State of Social Media Report. We surveyed more than 750 leaders in social media marketing, customer care and communications to zero in on the trends shaping customer experiences, so you can use them to inform your strategy accordingly.

The post Why you need an exceptional customer service strategy (and how to develop one) appeared first on Sprout Social.

Customers now wield more power than ever before and have endless product options. Competition has become increasingly stiff, and only brands focusing on building customer relationships and a loyal following are poised for long-term success. Our survey data shows that 58% of people buy from brands they trust, and 36% choose brands that genuinely understand their needs.

In this article, we answer everything you need to know about customer satisfaction score (CSAT). We’ll discuss its importance and how to calculate it. Further, we’ll also share strategies to help you improve your CSAT score.

Table of contents:

• What is CSAT?
• How to calculate CSAT
• Alternatives to using CSAT
• Benefits of using CSAT
• Tips for improving CSAT

What is CSAT?

A customer satisfaction score, or CSAT, is a customer service metric designed to measure customers’ happiness and satisfaction with a company’s product or service. More than a customer service metric, a customer satisfaction score can be described as a tool that makes it possible for businesses to:

• Measure the quality of customer experience delivered to their customers
• Collect user feedback on your brand, product or service
• Predict the likelihood of customers churning
• Collect data on customer expectations and develop features to meet such expectations.

CSAT is measured individually, meaning the feedback is collected from individual customers at different stages of the customer survey. Companies use CSAT surveys to ask customers simple feedback questions such as “How satisfied are you with your experience?” or “How would you rate our product/service?”

CSAT survey measures satisfaction level on a scale containing either binary response (yes/no), an emoticon scale (😁 or 😞) or on a 5-point or 7-point Likert scale (e.g. 1- Strongly disagree to 5- Strongly agree). You can place these surveys strategically through emails, in-app or online feedback to collect customer feedback.

How to calculate CSAT

Calculating your CSAT score is quite straightforward. With a CSAT survey, you can ask customers to rate your products or services using a scaled-based response system.

When the results are in, you simply divide the total number of happy responses (ratings from 8-10) by the total number of customers surveyed and then multiply by 10.

Let’s assume you receive 150 positive responses from a pool of 250 respondents, your CSAT score would be 60%. Breaking it down,

A CSAT score is calculated on a zero-to-one scale, with 100 percent being the highest score. For many companies, achieving 100% is the goal. However, that is not to say that any score exceeding 50% (ideally 60% or 70%) should not be viewed as positive.

While achieving a 100% CSAT score is commendable, it’s also important to benchmark it against other metrics. Compare the total number of CSAT responses you’ve received to the total number of your customers. This way, you can tell if your CSAT score is truly an indicator of your overall customer satisfaction.

For example, if 100 of your 250 responses are positive, but you have a total of 1,000 customers, then your CSAT score is not a true representation of your customer satisfaction level.

How to calculate customer satisfaction using Sprout Social

Sprout Social users can use the customer feedback tool to build customer satisfaction surveys and collect customer feedback from social platforms. To create customer feedback in Sprout, follow these steps:

Step 1. Log In to your Sprout Social account.

Step 2. Next, access customer feedback configuration. Do this by navigating to “Account and Settings” section. Click on settings.

Step 3. Under “Inbox and reviews,” select customer feedback. Choose the social profile for which you want to configure your CSAT survey.

Step 4. Select the Enable feedback checkbox to configure your survey. Scroll down to the survey section. Here, you can set up CSAT surveys for Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

Step 5. To automatically send a request for feedback, select Automate.

Step 6. Once you’re done, you can click “Save” to save your settings or “Reset Settings” to start over. You can also customize the appearance of your CSAT survey by selecting Customize under Appearance.

Once you’ve configured your CSAT survey, Sprout Social will automatically send a feedback request to customers after they interact with your brand on social media. You can view your CSAT results in the Customer Feedback Report. This report shows you the average CSAT score for each social media platform, as well as the percentage of customers who rated their satisfaction as “Very Satisfied.”

Analyze the results in the Customer Service Feedback Report to gain insights into your CSAT scores and make data-driven decisions to improve your customer experience.

Alternatives to CSAT

Businesses use customer satisfaction metrics like customer satisfaction score (CSAT), Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Effort Score (CES) depending on the goal they want to achieve. Let’s discuss two alternatives to CSAT.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

NPS is a customer satisfaction metric that measures the possibility of users recommending your products to others on a scale of 0-10. It is measured to gauge customer sentiment and loyalty by asking one question: “How likely are you to recommend {product name} to a friend or colleague? ”

NPS scores are good predictors of business growth; a high score indicates a healthy customer relationship, while lower scores say otherwise. With NPS surveys, you can track how certain interactions in the customer journey, for example, feature upgrades, affect customer loyalty over time.

Customer Effort Score (CES)

The Customer Effort Score Metric, or CES, is a metric used to evaluate the ease of a customer’s experience with a company. It measures how much effort customers put into interacting with a product to achieve their desired outcome, whether purchasing, resolving an issue or getting support.

CES survey typically asks questions such as “On a scale of 1-5, how easy was it to {experience}?” The score is typically measured on a 5-point or 7-point scale, ranging from “very difficult to very easy.” By measuring CES scores, companies can pinpoint areas where customers are experiencing difficulty and where there’s a need for improvement to make the experience seamless for their customers.

5 benefits of using CSAT

Now that we’ve covered the definitions, let’s understand why you should start using CSAT.

1. CSAT is intuitive and easy to use

CSAT surveys are designed in a way that is easy to understand. They’re user-friendly, easy to understand and can be customized easily without much difficulty. CSAT survey often comes with one question that’s easy to understand and feels interactive to the respondent.

2. Higher response rates

Because CSAT surveys are short and straight to the point, they usually have a higher response rate. They require minimal time and effort from the customer, and as long as they appear contextually, customers won’t mind sharing their opinions.

3. CSAT allows for more versatile questions

CSAT allows you to ask questions in various ways and based on various experiences, which makes it adaptable to different customer interactions. Its versatility can be valuable when collecting insights from multiple customer experiences and tailoring questions to suit the specific context and goals. For instance, you can tailor one CSAT survey to analyze your customer service and feature interactions.

4. CSAT is better for specific experiences or features

CSAT is suitable for evaluating specific experiences (e.g., onboarding) or product or service features. Every aspect of your product matters, and with CSAT, you can measure how satisfied customers are with that particular aspect of your product offering rather than the overall experience. Address areas with low CSAT scores and clear out friction points to improve the customer experience and satisfaction.

5. Less customer churn

A higher customer satisfaction score leads to higher customer retention and a lower churn rate. Customers come for the product but stay for the experience. A higher satisfaction score indicates that customers are satisfied and will remain loyal to your company.

8 tips for improving CSAT

Achieving a high CSAT score is the primary goal of every organization, but as lovely as that sounds it doesn’t happen overnight. You need to be consistent and apply the following best practices to consistently provide customers with the best experience.

1. Ask the right questions

The success of a customer satisfaction survey depends on the questions you ask. Good questions should be easy to understand, be answered in a short time and remain relevant to their purpose. The right questions yield accurate responses, but poorly crafted ones can have adverse effects. They introduce survey bias, lower response rates and compromise data quality.

Identifying bad questions can be challenging, as they often hide in plain sight. So, here’s what you should watch out for:

• Using biased language to prompt positive responses.
• Questions with difficult wordings
• Asking vague, complex or ambiguous questions
• Overloading respondents with too many questions at once
• Using double negative in your questions

When building your survey, frame your questions carefully. Guide users to answer questions, without imposing any expectations on them.

2. Send feedback contextually

Sending feedback contextually means your CSAT survey appears when it is relevant to a specific touchpoint in a customer’s journey. This could be after a customer completes a specific action you’re collecting feedback on or after they pass a new milestone. This real-time approach captures fresh, unfiltered customer opinions, providing more reliable data.

At Sprout, we use microsurveys at different customer touchpoints to collect feedback contextually. For instance, you’d typically find microsurveys placed after our customer support articles and as you use our product in-app.

This feedback is more effective and actionable because it directly relates to a specific experience, making it easier for our team to understand and act on it meaningfully.

3. Set appropriate goals for your CSAT

Since customer satisfaction (CSAT) is not as evident to stakeholders as customer acquisition, it’s often overlooked when it comes to setting goals. Creating CSAT goals is the first step to successful goal achievement. It gives your team a sense of direction and aligns your team’s actions with your business goals.

A couple of goals you might consider setting include:

• Increasing your CSAT score by a certain percentage by the end of the quarter
• Reducing churn and increasing customer retention by a certain percentage by the end of the year

4. Create a support omnichannel

Implementing a seamless customer support system across various communication channels can significantly improve customer satisfaction. Customers expect a fast response from your support team regardless of the channel they contact for assistance.

Want to create an Omnichannel support experience? Here’s what it involves:

• Integrate multiple support channels like email, phone calls and social media chat to access customer data across all channels.
• Use customer data to personalize interactions and create an omnichannel customer experience
• Improve your issue resolution time by equipping your customer support agents with the right tools.
• Close the feedback loop by implementing feedback requests and updating the customers afterward.
• Invest in an advanced tool like Sprout Social to have a centralized view of your customer data.

5. Use feedback to improve your product or service

Knowing your CSAT score and collecting customer feedback will do no good if you don’t act on it. Feedback reveals what you’re doing right, product weaknesses and areas for improvement. This allows you to adjust your product expectations and fine-tune your customer experience strategy going forward.

After gathering feedback, analyze it for insights. Look for patterns, trends, opportunities and gaps your team may have overlooked. Tools like Sprout’s customer feedback report are used to organize, filter and categorize feedback by user segments.

Prioritize feedback that requires immediate action (e.g., bug fixes) and act on it. Categorize other feedback based on alignment with your current business goals, available resources and priorities. Include all these in a product roadmap for further research or validation in future development.

6. Reduce response times

Slow support response times can result in companies losing the trust and loyalty of their customers. Customers are highly impatient, and a slow response time comes with the consequence of a poor satisfaction score. In our 2022 Sprout Social Index, we discovered that customers expect quick responses: 40% within the first hour on social and 79% within the first 24 hours.

To speed up response time, offer self-service options like a resource center with FAQs, videos and chatbots. Brands use Sprout Social’s Bot Builder to automate their conversational workflow on social. Using Sprout’s Bot Builder for customer service, you can build a chatbot, preview it and then deploy it within minutes.

7. Address negative feedback

Receiving negative feedback is not easy for anyone. It can make us defensive, frustrated or angry. As a brand, receiving negative feedback is inevitable, no matter how hard you try to please your customers. These reviews can come from social media comments, review sites or even your CSAT surveys.

When you receive a negative review, don’t get defensive; negative feedback is not a personal attack on you or your brand. Listen carefully to the customer’s complaint and understand what happened and why it happened. Then, reach out to the customer and take responsibility. This can be done through email or by handling your feedback through Sprout.

Sprout’s Smart Inbox brings together comments and messages from multiple social media platforms into a single dashboard so you can monitor, view and respond to customers. What’s more, you can also monitor your notifications and brand mentions to catch negative feedback.

8. Measure your CSAT score regularly

Measuring your CSAT is not a one-time thing; it’s continuous. As you would measure and set financial goals for your brand, also set goals for improving your CSAT on a bi-monthly, quarterly or annual basis. Create a roadmap for the long run and set measures to:

• Review your CSAT and come up with better means for distribution (e.g., in-app, email, knowledgebase articles, etc.)
• Compare past and present CSAT scores to get an overview of current changes
• Set up one-on-one interviews with power users and churned users to find out your strengths and weaknesses.
• Document previous actions and their effectiveness on your CSAT score (e.g. Did adding more support channels improve our CSAT score? )
• Create a customer service report to document your process and results.

Use CSAT to improve your customer satisfaction

While exceeding customer satisfaction is the end-goal, sending out surveys, analyzing the results and finding patterns in your customer satisfaction score is extremely stressful, especially if you have a growing customer base. You need the right tool to automate this task so you can focus on achieving other important tasks in your business.

Sprout Social provides you with advanced customer care solutions to exceed customer expectations and deliver better experiences. Get started for free today.

The post Customer satisfaction score (CSAT): What it is and how to measure it appeared first on Sprout Social.

In this guide, we’ll take a deeper dive into why building customer relationships is so important as well as share nine strategies to help you get started.

Why is it important to build customer relationships?

Social media has changed the way businesses and customers interact with each other, and it’s important that social media is seen as an avenue for real-time communication and feedback.

And just because you’ve converted a new customer through lead generation or a sale doesn’t mean your work is done. You need to continue to build and nurture those customer relationships on social media so they keep coming back again and again. When you do, they’ll start advocating for your business and assist in the marketing for you.

There’s nothing quite like word-of-mouth marketing, and having solid foundations with your customers is a great way to keep them excited about your business. When you have customers who have enthusiasm for your business, not only will they continue to shop with you, but they’ll tell their friends and family about you as well.

This is why building strong customer relationships is an essential part of business and marketing. It’s smarter to retain loyal customers and continue to build customer relationships than to try to solely convert new ones.

To break it down further, it’s important to build customer relationships because it:

• Reduces customer turnover and improves customer loyalty. As with any organization, the less turnover the better. The same applies for customers: the longer you can retain your customers, the better mutual outcome. They receive excellent customer service and products from your business and, in turn, you receive their loyalty.
• Increases the customer lifetime value (CLV). This is a great social media KPI to capture. The longer a customer remains loyal and purchases from your business, the greater the value this customer has in their relationship with you.

What makes a strong customer relationship?

Strong customer relationships occur when your brand becomes top-of-mind to your customers. When they start referring friends and family to your business. When they trust your business to always get its work right, every time.

It can be difficult to get to this point, though—which is why you’re here. Your brand needs to build trust and deliver on consistency, timeliness and quality again and again.

One of the best ways to do this is through better listening. Listening to your customers and analyzing what they say gives you deeper insights into how to best serve them. Exceeding expectations every time will help you solidify strong customer relationships.

But—without further ado—here are additional tips and tricks to help you build customer relationships.

How to build customer relationships with social media

While there are many avenues you can use to help you build customer relationships—a forum, your website, email marketing, your blog and so many more—we’re here to talk about how you can do so through your social media platforms.

After all, you’ve worked hard to grow your following. Why not use that audience to convert and nurture longterm relationships with customers?

Here are our top nine tips for you.

1. Create a customer service social media channel

One great way to get started with relationship building on social media is to create a dedicated customer service channel. There are a few ways to do this.

First, you could simply take customer service requests on your existing social media accounts. X, specifically, is perfect for customer care.

However, many brands choose to create an X account specifically for handling customer service requests as well as communicating product support issues and resolutions. (Do a “support” or “customer support” search on X to find even more examples of customer service X accounts across a variety of industries.)

Here’s an example of Patreon’s X support profile—the brand has also linked to its main profile and a profile it has just for the website’s server status:

Additionally, you could add an option to your Facebook Messenger chatbot that allows customers to input customer service requests, or direct people to a support page on your website.

Ensure that all response times are quick and helpful to build a good reputation for your brand.

2. Use social listening to build customer relationships

Social listening is the act of monitoring certain topics and keywords online to ensure you find important mentions of your brand or related topics.

Sprout’s social listening tool collects and centralizes what people are saying about your brand, industry and related topics around your brand. With this information, you can modify and improve your campaigns and messages. Make more informed decisions to help your customers solve their problems and provide valuable answers to questions.

Or, utilize this knowledge to gather a list of blog posts, new features and learning resources that you know your audience wants to see.

3. Listen to customer feedback

It’s one thing to have an outlet for customers to provide feedback. It’s another entirely to actually do something with that feedback.

Show your customers that you care about their input by putting their suggestions and wants into practice.

Whether it’s a new product that you launch or a new feature in your software, listening to and implementing customer feedback is an essential step in gaining their trust and loyalty. It shows that you hear their concerns and needs and you’re willing to act on it for their benefit.

4. Personalize customer experiences

Another great way to build customer relationships is through personalization. Consider adding a live chat widget to your website for support and customer questions. Your audience will be able to speak to a real person who calls them by their name and provides a real experience.

Other ways to personalize experiences are by ensuring social media interactions and email newsletters include your recipient’s first name. Here’s an example of how Victoria’s Secret personalized a response on X.

Whether you’re dealing with customer service issues or simply interacting with your followers’ tweets, creating that personal connection is key.

5. Create a relatable brand voice

One of the best ways to build strong connections to your audience: be relatable! Social media should be fun, and while you don’t have to be overly casual, there are still ways to let your audience enjoy your presence through your brand voice.

Take a page out of MoonPie’s X account. The brand shares humorous content, jumps on memes it can relate back to its brand, and takes any opportunity it can to hype up the moon.

Try sharing memes that are timely and relevant to your brand, use current lingo and take a look around at other brands to see if you can get any ideas to help your brand voice become more relatable online.

6. Offer rewards and incentives

We all love free stuff, which is why putting together contests and giveaways is one great way to offer rewards and incentives to your audience.

Check out this giveaway from Fable England on Instagram. The brand asks Instagram users to follow a few quick steps—including leaving a comment and tagging friends—in order to enter the giveaway. It’s effortless and it gets followers excited and engaged.

Consider sharing flash sales on social media, including freebies and discount codes.

Here’s a great example from Pepsi, sharing a promo code that offers some kind of freebie or savings surrounding the brand’s latest co-branding partnership.

Think about the ways that you can implement these tactics in your own social media strategy.

7. Share user-generated content

Customers love to share and tag brand products in their photos when posting on social media. This is called user-generated content, or UGC, and is a helpful tactic both for community building and for filling your social calendar up with hyper-relevant content.

For example, dog subscription box retailer Bark uses UGC in its Instagram strategy to showcase various dogs of Instagram for engaging and adorable content. The brand always tags the original creator to give due credit. It’s important to note that you should ask permission before reposting a users’ photograph onto your brand account.

Here’s an example of one of Bark’s UGC posts:

As a way to build a community and encourage your customers to share their photos of your product is to put some sort of call-to-action for your followers. Share this in your bio, like we see below on Nestle’s Instagram bio—the brand has asked for users to tag its profile in photos of their “delicious moments.”

8. Provide value on social media

There are so many different types of content you can create on social media. Some will—of course—be more promotional in nature, because your business is to make a profit both solve customer’s problems and needs as well as make a profit.

However, you need to ensure there’s a good balance between your promotional content and the educational and free value you provide to your audience, whether it’s freebies, discount codes or knowledge.

Share your business’ value visually in a Facebook or Instagram carousel, or you can create an X (formerly known as Twitter) thread that shares information like we did below.

Share blog content and create educational videos to inform your audience even more. Providing free value helps to showcase how beneficial your product must be, bringing in new customers and building a relationship to help those customers stick around.

9. Build an online community

Our last tip for building customer relationships is to focus on building a community. Whether it’s through a Facebook Group, an other online community or branded hashtags, invite your audience to participate.

One great example of a highly active Slack community is Superpath, a content marketing-focused Slack group. The founder publishes posts in an #announcement channel to share valuable content, conversations in the group and a call-to-action to join the paid channels.

You can create your own Facebook Group, start a Slack community or look into other platforms perfect for community building. This is a great way to keep people aware of and talking about your brand, even when you’re not directly selling to them.

How is AI used to build customer relationships?

AI, or artificial intelligence, can also play a role in building customer relationships. A number of AI and machine learning tools have come out of the woodwork in the last couple of years, helping to automate and streamline processes to make teams even more efficient.

Using AI in customer service can help with relationship building in a number of ways:

• Be more proactive with your customer support
• Scale customer care to help more people faster
• Improve the quality of your support chatbots
• Personalize customer interactions

All in all, incorporating AI can help your customer support team do their job better and more quickly. And the better your customer support is, the more likely customers are apt to stick around and continue buying from you.

The post How to build customer relationships with social media appeared first on Sprout Social.