For over two decades, audiences have turned to social media to share praise, air grievances and everything in between. Social is an established support channel, yet only 20% of brands have well-defined social customer care strategies.
Social customer care is your chance at a competitive edge. To help you secure the advantage, we surveyed consumers and leaders across customer service, marketing and communications to find out how leading brands are elevating the most pivotal touchpoint in the customer experience.
63% of consumers agree that their loyalty to a brand is significantly influenced by the quality of customer support they provide on social media, and leaders across customer service, marketing and communications are taking note.
Consumers are raising their standards, and businesses are struggling to keep up. Click the cards below to reveal insights on the current state of social customer service.
They believe themselves to be leaders in customer care on social media.
Their brand actively engages with customers on social media and has implemented some customer service tools and processes.
Most companies don't have a strong social media strategy for customer service and care.
It’s not that companies don’t want to provide better customer service on social—it’s that many aren’t equipped to do so effectively. Here’s why.
63% of marketers say they often deal with a high volume of customer requests, which prevents them from meeting time-to-resolution goals.
48% of marketers say manual tasks take up a significant amount of time, likely due to process redundancies and lack of cross-functional visibility.
41% of marketers say they have gaps in available customer information for agents to reference when handling requests, preventing personalization that creates better customer experiences.
Here are the top four process adjustments social teams plan to implement to improve customer experiences.
Nearly half (43%) of surveyed brands plan to use social listening and monitoring to support more customer-centric service strategies. This rich data plays a critical role in understanding customer sentiment—the most common use case identified by marketers.
Social customer care engagement sits at the intersection of customer service and brand marketing, creating a learning curve for traditional support agents. Over a third (40%) of social teams are solving this by leveraging shared data analytics to personalize social media interactions and enhance customer experiences.
Increased collaboration between social and customer service teams starts with connected tools that support robust, cross-functional workflows. Business leaders are on board here, with 96% expecting social data to be integrated into their company’s CRM capabilities over the next three years.
Social media plays an integral role in any modern customer service strategy—no matter your audience. Here are three ways you can level up your company’s strategy in 2024.
Map out the individuals, processes and tools that currently support your social customer service strategy. This is a good opportunity to connect with agents to zero in on the pain points that prevent teams from offering top tier service.
What slows teams down? What limits the overall quality of support? These insights will inform your next steps.
When it comes to channel ownership, many businesses (36%) plan on making the channel a shared responsibility between marketing and service teams.
If you’re looking to centralize social customer care responsibilities within a specific team, you’ll have to embrace well-defined collaboration instead. Even agreeing on a responsibility assignment matrix—like the RACI model, for example—can create much-needed structure around internal processes.
Half (50%) of marketers plan to implement advanced social media management software to scale social customer care, underscoring the need for a platform that can handle both marketing and customer service objectives.
The addition of these tools will increase visibility between teams, decreasing the chance of missing priority customer concerns and questions.
We surveyed over 1,800 consumers and 900 marketers to uncover their priorities in today’s shifting social media landscape, where the gaps are and how to close them. Download the Sprout Social Index™ Report for more insights on the intersection of social and customer service.
The 2023 Sprout Social Index Report. Research was conducted online in the US and UK by Cint on behalf of Sprout Social. Participants included 1,817 consumers who follow at least five brands on social media. Additionally, 903 full-time social marketers involved in managing their brand’s social media strategy (i.e., performed the job themselves or managed someone who does) were surveyed from a cross section of US and UK businesses. Both surveys were conducted from June 12 to June 23, 2023.
The 2023 State of Social Media. 778 US and UK social media marketing, customer care and communications professionals were recruited by the Harris Poll on behalf of Sprout Social between March 13-27, 2023. Titles held by participants include Manager or Sr. Manager (16%), Director or Sr. Director (19%), Vice President (40%), C-level Executive (19%) or Owner/President (6%). Relationships between variables collected were analyzed using parametric statistics for statistical significance.