According to the 2021 Sprout Social Index, 31% of customers prefer to leave feedback on social media—and Allegiant’s social-dedicated Customer Relations team knows the importance of staying on top of customer comments.

We have drastically increased how many messages we’re replying to across platforms, especially on Facebook. And we’re servicing more customers even though our team has been consistently the same size.

Alyssa Salazar
Customer Relations Manager

“Having social media allows us to respond to and help retain our customers, as well as build brand loyalty,” said Allegiant’s Customer Relations Manager Alyssa Salazar.

The airline industry has been hard-hit during the pandemic, with ticket sales dropping and customer needs skyrocketing. Since 2020, Sprout Social has helped Allegiant organize thousands of messages, collaborate more easily and focus on customer retention. Amid the pandemic, Sprout empowered Allegiant to continue to connect people.

Forwarding the gold (wings) standard of customer care with Instagram DMs

With around 15% of their customer inquiries coming through social, Allegiant’s team knows that a seamless customer care experience is crucial—to them and their customers.

Salazar manages a team of customer service agents who provide coverage seven days a week answering messages on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

The sharp increase in messages has meant an increased need for speed. In Q3 2019, the Customer Relations team responded to 8,185 messages across their social channels. In Q3 2021, that number nearly doubled to 14,490.

Sprout Social’s Smart Inbox helped them take off.

“We have drastically increased how many messages we’re replying to across platforms, especially on Facebook,” Salazar said. “And we’re servicing more customers even though our team has been consistently the same size.”

Having Instagram Direct Messages (DMs) in the Smart Inbox has also helped them, especially considering the fact that 35% of US consumers turn to Instagram for customer service. Salazar’s team used to answer Instagram messages natively on an iPad, limiting responsiveness and speed.

“Access to Instagram DMs has helped us tremendously,” Salazar said. “Our agents have all given us positive feedback about how this is pushing us forward, making our team more efficient and serving our customers faster.”

We have certain types of responses that we use for different questions. Tagging based on specific keywords clarifies what the issue or concern is about so we can quickly respond.

Alyssa Salazar
Customer Relations Manager

Tagging to avoid turbulent teamwork

With hundreds of messages divided across agents, staying organized is crucial. On top of maintaining speed with pre-crafted answer templates, Allegiant Air uses Sprout’s robust internal tagging capabilities to identify duplicate messages, prioritize DMs and organize workflows.

“When the agents start their day, they remove any duplicate messages and start assigning messages to themselves to work on,” Salazar said.

Using a tagging system featuring rules built around keywords helps them quickly identify what a customer needs and how to respond.

“We have certain types of responses that we use for different questions, so tagging based on specific keywords clarifies what the issue or concern is about so we can quickly respond.”

Building brand loyalty with customers on the ground and 30,000 feet up

“We’re not necessarily an everyday type of product,” said Content Marketing Specialist Tiana Schenk. “But we want to be top-of-mind when someone books a trip, so that we can connect travelers to the people, places and memories that matter most.”

It’s tough to build brand loyalty when your product isn’t one you use every day. “COVID-19 has definitely shifted how we operate and function as a company overall,” Salazar said.

Staying on top of inquiries on social has helped Allegiant better communicate options available to customers based on company policies and other factors. In some cases, that means offering customers options that allow them to maintain their ticket for later use, while allowing the airline to maintain crucial sales.

Sprout is also integral to another piece of the brand loyalty puzzle—celebrating customers who celebrate Allegiant. Sourcing and sharing user-generated content has become a smoother, more collaborative process between the Content Marketing and Customer Relations teams by assigning tasks in Sprout.

“When folks on the Customer Relations team interact with customers or when we search for content to publish on our social channels, having the ability to simply assign a task over to the Content Marketing folks so that we can ask for the rights to use those photos is a seamless process,” Schenk said.

Sprout Social helps Allegiant Air keep customer service flying high

With Sprout Social, Allegiant Air stays steady. Using the Smart Inbox has made their customer relations strategy and team collaboration smoother, giving them more time to focus on nurturing their social channels and customer loyalty. Above all, they’ve found new ways to put the customer first by more quickly identifying their needs.

If you’re interested in seeing how Sprout Social can help make your customer service team’s and customers’ experience more seamless, request a personalized demo or start your free 30-day trial today.

The post How Allegiant Air’s customer relations team is taking flight with Sprout Social appeared first on Sprout Social.

“Purdue’s social media content is used to tell stories about Purdue Boilermakers and connect with students—past, present and future,” says Assistant Director of Digital Engagement, Abby Eddy.

When Abby jumped onboard in 2019, she was faced with building a team from the ground up to broaden social’s reach and impact across the Purdue community. The Digital Engagement team was born, and has become a well-oiled machine. Thanks to the team including–three social media professionals and five interns, followers now engage with Purdue’s social content more than ever.

Purdue uses Sprout Social as a cross-departmental hub to level up social listening, create robust reports and keep their content on track.

Engineering engagement for students and alumni

The Digital Engagement team manages all of the University’s non-athletic channels across Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat, TikTok and Pinterest with more than 900,000 followers combined. And as their name suggests, they have a laser-focus on engagement.

We use Sprout’s Profile and Post Performance Reports to identify our top posts and to see what engagement looks like across channels monthly. We’re always looking at how we can replicate the success of top posts on other channels, and adjusting content accordingly.

Abby Eddy
Assistant Director of Digital Engagement, Purdue University

“We’ve always had the motto that you can have a million followers, but if only a thousand are interacting with your content, your channels are useless,” Abby tells us.

Using Sprout takes the guesswork out of understanding what content resonates. “We use Sprout’s Profile and Post Performance Reports to identify our top posts and to see what engagement looks like across channels monthly,” says Abby. “We’re always looking at how we can replicate the success of top posts on other channels, and adjusting content accordingly.”

Sometimes, diving into analytics uncovers surprises that guide future strategies.

“We found that people love our nostalgic ‘then and now content’—it unifies alumni as well as current students, especially on Instagram. But it was surprising to find out that these posts performed really well on LinkedIn,” Abby says.

Purdue also uses Sprout to make sure they never miss an opportunity to interact with their audience. “Our interns are in the Smart Inbox daily,” says Social Media Specialist, Kolby Hagmaier. “They filter one channel at a time and look at comments from the previous 24 hours with the hope that everything is marked ‘complete’ at all times.”

The system they’ve developed is working. With 4.5 million total engagements, they’re already 151% to goal for the 2021-2022 school year.

We use Tags for every piece of content that we publish within Sprout, from overarching brand pillar tags to post-specific ones.

Kolby Hagmaier
Social Media Specialist, Purdue University

Where Boiler Up means listen up 

Purdue’s social team uses Sprout’s Listening feature to keep their ear to the ground and finger on the pulse of campus conversations and brand health. “We have alerts set up to help monitor spikes in conversation around specific topics,” Social Media Manager Ashlee Shroyer tells us. “It’s a helpful way to immediately identify if something is gaining traction—good or bad.”

In catching a crisis, speed matters—especially if a request for more information comes straight from the top.

“We’ve received requests from our President’s office to quickly run a report on topics and how they’re appearing on social media,” Ashlee tells us. “With our general ‘Purdue University’ topic, we’re able to search quickly by keywords to provide a fast snapshot.”

Social listening has also helped them collaborate with the Strategic Communication team to keep an eye on potential crises before they spin out. This keeps them proactive—not reactive. “It’s hard to know when something is starting to bubble up,” Abby tells us. “So if the Strategic Communication team gets wind of something, they can ask us to create Listening Topics to monitor it.”

But listening isn’t all crisis mode and no fun. The team also uses the Word Cloud (see an example of the Word Cloud for Sprout’s fictional coffee brand below) to identify  unexpected gems that inspire content—from conversations and themes to emojis.

“We see a lot of emojis in there,” Kolby tells us. “We’ll implement those same emojis in our posts to stay in lockstep with our audience.”

Using Tags to keep tabs on content and connect students

Purdue has a unique marketing superpower—an ambassador program of around 50 students who bring a first-hand perspective to their digital presence.

“Boiler Ambassadors use Sprout for their student-run Instagram account,” says Ashlee. “We provide Sprout training to all of the students so that they can publish and tag content, as well as run their own reports.”

After receiving Sprout and brand voice training, the students have free reign of their Instagram account and create content themselves. Using a special tag just for the ambassadors helps the student team and the Digital Engagement Team filter their specific posts.

With student ambassadors, interns and a full-time team powering Purdue’s social presence, maintaining one brand voice when responding to comments is key—especially when you’re fresh off of a 2020 rebrand.

Sprout is used as a cross-team hub where everyone can find pre-written responses in a unified brand voice—both evergreen FAQ responses and templates for events like big games or commencement.

“We have specific language we want to weave into comments and responses,” Abby emphasizes. “So we created a set of pre-populated responses in the Sprout Social Asset Library that our interns can pull from, which gives them the flexibility to respond to comments on the fly but also makes sure they’re comfortable with the language we’re using.”

Boiler Ambassadors use Sprout for their student-run Instagram account. We provide Sprout training to all of the students so that they can publish and tag content, as well as run their own reports.

Ashlee Shroyer
Social Media Manager, Purdue University

Keeping teamwork on track and revolutionizing reporting

A robust social team needs a robust organizational system to match. The Digital Engagement team has mastered the art of tracking and reporting on content. “We use Tags for every piece of content that we publish within Sprout, from overarching brand pillar tags to post-specific ones,” says Kolby.

They use the Tag Performance Report on a weekly basis to help their whole department quickly understand the impact and success of content. And they’ve used Sprout to revolutionize digital reporting—on their own team and interdepartmentally.

“The analytics we pull from Sprout are a major piece of the monthly digital performance reports we share with the full marketing department,” Abby tells us. “Those highlight everything from our social metrics and campaign updates to website analytics.”

Using Sprout, they are able to share social findings with the larger marketing department to celebrate successes, suggest data-driven changes and provide insight into their efforts.

Their ability to prove their efforts and results with data has built trust between the Digital Engagement team and marketing leadership—granting them the autonomy to post content that works.

“Sometimes we have to push back on the amount of content that we’re asked to push out because the volume of posts has gone up. But when that happens, we see engagement dip a little bit,” Abby tells us.

All aboard the future of social at Purdue 

Purdue has recognized and harnessed the power of social. They’re even using it to power larger digital initiatives. Having met and exceeded their 2021-2022 engagement goals, the Digital Engagement Team already has their eyes set on what’s next. In the future, they plan to even more closely track the role social plays in driving audiences to their admission site and converting them into future Boilermakers.

If you’re ready to connect your teams and your audience through the power of social media using Sprout Social, start your free 30-day trial or request a personalized demo. Get ready to tap into the game-changing insights waiting for you and your brand.

The post All aboard: How Purdue University increased their social media engagement by 24% appeared first on Sprout Social.

During the 2020 holiday season, Solo Stove (like many brands) struggled with supply chain delays that prevented many stoves from arriving to customers in time for Christmas. High email and call volumes overwhelmed the nine-person customer service team, so many customers turned to social media to vent their frustrations.

Amid the chaos, Solo Stove Community Manager Katelin Keeling saw a silver lining, “This was the perfect opportunity to expand our customer care strategy to social media.”

In 2021, Katelin went from a one-woman show to leading a team of three social customer care agents covering 8 a.m. to 12 a.m. Instagram became a primary network for Solo Stove, where they receive over 1,000 mentions per day. Thanks to Sprout Social’s Smart Inbox and Instagram DMs integration, Solo Stove’s customer care team never misses a message—or an opportunity to deliver personalized support to their audience on social.

Before using Sprout, my agents wouldn’t be able to find and address all incoming Instagram messages during their shifts, creating a backlog for the next person on duty. It’s amazing for our team to no longer spend hours searching for DMs.

Katelin Keeling
Community Manager, Solo Stove

Making efficiency elemental to strong customer service

Previously, Katelin’s team was swamped manually sorting through multiple native inboxes to identify and prioritize Instagram DMs to respond to. Solo Stove turned to Sprout’s Smart Inbox to help manage their influx of social media messages and make their Instagram workflow more efficient.

Using Sprout’s Inbox Views and Automated Rules, Katelin built out a clear structure to prioritize incoming messages in Sprout. The team organizes messages into three main views:

• A “troll” queue that automatically routes messages based on common troll keywords
• A customer support queue that automatically routes messages based on common terms like email, order status, shipping, etc.
• All remaining non-urgent messages, typically around positive engagement or feedback

“Before using Sprout, my agents wouldn’t be able to find and address all incoming Instagram messages during their shifts, creating a backlog for the next person on duty,” Katelin shared.

“[Our old process] took so much time that could be spent helping a customer. It’s amazing for our team to no longer spend hours searching for DMs.”

Igniting “fire” brand reviews

Since overall brand health and customer relationship building are key goals for Katelin’s team, they track sentiment levels on incoming messages. In the four months following Solo Stove’s Instagram DMs integration in Sprout, social messages tagged with a positive sentiment rose 24% across networks compared to the prior four-month period.

Katelin is confident that managing Instagram DMs in Sprout—and delivering quicker customer care as a result—has helped with retention. “So many people write reviews that they were helped on social media, and their experience was so positive it turned them into a true believer of Solo Stove.”

A mission to create good

With Sprout Social, Solo Stove’s social customer care team works more efficiently to deliver first class, personalized service to their audience. Considering that word of mouth fuels 60% of Solo Stove’s sales, social has the power to grow and maintain customer relationships. Recognizing this power, Katelin and team ensure that their customers have the best possible experience with the brand company from the get-go.

While the stress of the 2020 holiday season is hard to forget, a growing team and new customer care strategy means Solo Stove will be ready for anything.

Learn how your business can benefit from Sprout Social’s customer care and messaging capabilities. Request a free hands-on demo today.

The post How Solo Stove creates great customer care moments on social appeared first on Sprout Social.

When it comes to stand-out customer communication on social, Grammarly uses Sprout. With Sprout Social, the Grammarly social support team can manage user questions, product concerns and audience conversations across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. This streamlined approach helps them create a dialogue with current and potential users while finding opportunities to surprise and delight as they go.

“We want to help people be even more confident that they can achieve effective communication, whether they’re writing for school, professionally, or even through text message. We use Sprout to help make those connections possible,” said Emma Hanevelt, Social Media Insights Analyst.

Clear, consistent customer care

Hanevelt works with a team of 10 led by Manager Beth Hibbert. Together, the team is responsible for engaging with the Grammarly audience, answering user questions and analyzing social data for business insights. With Sprout, they’re able to respond to messages across networks quickly and efficiently.

“We’re in the Smart Inbox daily, managing posts and DMs from Twitter and Facebook, as well as Instagram comments,” said Hanevelt. “We’ve also launched Brand Keywords tracking, so we can respond to users who mention Grammarly without tagging our account.”

Grammarly’s social support team spans two time zones, with support agents based in both Canada and Ukraine. In less than two years (during which they brought Sprout on), their average time to first response (TTFR) decreased more than 80%.

“We love the team Conversations feature,” said Hanevelt. “If someone working out of Kyiv isn’t able to solve an issue by the time they log off, they can leave a note. Then, the Vancouver team can pick it up and continue the conversation with all the necessary context.”

Streamlining their social support process to a single platform has also helped surface data that Hibbert can use internally to manage and grow her team. Insights from Sprout inform coaching conversations across the social support team, which ultimately lead to stronger customer service.

“With the Inbox Team Report, we can see our overall message volume across channels and better measure agent productivity,” said Hibbert. “If I’m having a one-to-one with someone, I can use their specific report to highlight their performance or dig into growth areas. It’s been a game-changer for us. ”

Delivering product insights with tags

The Grammarly team leveled up their Smart Inbox use by developing a comprehensive tagging strategy that allows them to organize incoming messages based on their content. Tags empower Grammarly support agents to do the foundational work needed to uncover advanced customer insights.

“It’s one of the most important features for us,” said Hanevelt. “Because every message that comes into our inbox gets tagged, we can quickly pull specific feedback when needed. If any of our product managers come to us asking for messages on a certain product, we have it. We also build quarterly reports on themes we find in our social messages.”

So far, their approach to tagging has helped surface valuable user stories for the Grammarly product and user experience teams, as well as company leadership.

“Once a month, we combine tagging insights from Sprout with Zendesk reports to create a deck that gets shared across the organization,” said Hanevelt. “It’s how we keep others up to date on trends and opportunities we’re seeing in customer support.”

Setting the tone with listening

In 2021, Grammarly began using Sprout’s Social Listening tools to monitor brand health and competitive share of voice. Since then, they’ve been able to extract even more product insights from priority platforms like Twitter and Reddit.

These insights have driven further collaboration between the social support team and the rest of the business. Hanevelt’s long-term goal is to make Listening a key lever for the broader marketing, product and user research teams.

“Right now, I’m focused on making social listening a more known resource,” said Hanevelt. “If I see someone share a slide deck in Slack, I’ll go to them and ask ‘How can I support you with social insights?’ We’ve set up monthly syncs with our consumer insights team, as well as our user experience team, so I can complement their work with listening data from Sprout.”

Hanevelt sees major opportunities for social listening at Grammarly, and has been creating slide decks to share insights from Sprout with the wider organization.

“Hopefully, we’ll start hosting more hands-on workshops so we can bring social stories to the forefront of the conversation,” said Hanevelt. “We want to share our social data so we can help shape product decisions across Grammarly.”

Grammarly is rewriting the rules of customer care by sharing industry and competitive insights that inform proactive decision-making. If you’re interested in seeing how your social data can do the same, request a personalized demo or start your free 30-day trial today.

The post How Grammarly delivers engaging customer care with Sprout Social appeared first on Sprout Social.

Customer experience is at the heart of the NJ TRANSIT brand. “Our company’s goal is to give customers the best experience possible through social media so they have everything they need for an enjoyable trip,” said Carol Mack, NJ TRANSIT’s Director of Events and Social Media. To deliver a great customer experience, NJ TRANSIT needed a social media management solution that would help them optimize customer care efforts, streamline response management and provide timely updates about their services. They needed Sprout Social.

When people think of transit, we don’t want them to think of just equipment and stations so we use social to give our employees a voice and to humanize them to the public.

Carol Mack
Director of Events & Social Media, NJ TRANSIT

Supporting cross-functional strategies 

While NJ TRANSIT uses Instagram as their primary platform for branding and LinkedIn is for more professional purposes, they’re most engaged with their customers on Facebook and Twitter. What’s unique about their Twitter strategy is that in addition to their main NJ TRANSIT Twitter account, they also run 14 accounts that are each dedicated to a specific transit line.

Their content strategy for each line account is simple: provide real-time updates for travelers. Having service-specific accounts keeps important, relevant information organized and accessible for transit riders. It also means that the NJ TRANSIT social team can focus their corporate Twitter handle on their brand messaging, news, initiatives and anything else that’s important to the customer.

Another important characteristic of NJ TRANSIT’s customer care and social strategies is how they draw attention to the people behind their brand. “When people think of transit, we don’t want them to think of just equipment and stations so we use social to give our employees a voice and to humanize them to the public,” said Mack.

For example, the NJ TRANSIT Police Department does much more than provide high-quality safety and security for the transit system. They also have an outreach program staffed by five outreach officers throughout the state that helps connect the homeless with necessary social and medical services, as well as housing opportunities. The police department’s Twitter account gives them a platform to share those lesser-known efforts, which has made a major impact on humanizing the department.

The Police Department has an intelligence division that uses Sprout’s powerful Listening features to monitor conversations across social. Using keywords and location-based searches provides the department with timely access to conversations occurring across the transit system. This intelligence gathering allows them to deploy resources to maintain the safety of our customers and employees systemwide.

Highlighting their people and initiatives also helps shape NJ TRANSIT’s employer brand and influence recruitment. “Hiring qualified people is very important to us. We’ve taken extra efforts to make sure we use social media to help our human resources department get the best talent that they can,” said Mack. “When we started using social to assist with hiring bus operators, we saw a 60% increase in resumes.”

We work directly from Sprout’s Smart Inbox and it’s straightforward just like a Twitter stream, so it’s also very easy to get people up to speed on how to use it.

Kevin Minott
Senior Communications Coordinator, NJ TRANSIT

Keep your wheels turning on social

While the content strategies differ between the line accounts, the police department account and their main account, the entire NJ TRANSIT social team uses Sprout’s Smart Inbox to monitor each account in a single feed. Before using Sprout, the team would have to log in natively to each line account to respond to customers, which negatively impacted response time—an important metric for the team’s customer service strategy.

The confusing, disorganized user interface of their former platform negatively impacted response time. “We work directly from Sprout’s Smart Inbox and it’s straightforward just like a Twitter stream, so it’s also very easy to get people up to speed on how to use it,” said Kevin Minott, NJ TRANSIT’s Senior Communications Coordinator. “I was able to get our SVP of communications and customer experience up and running on Sprout in just one day.”

I am in love with the Task feature. It ensures that all the information we need in order to respond stays with the right message.

Carol Mack
Director of Events & Social Media, NJ TRANSIT

Don’t lose your train of thought

Whether customers are asking about a technical issue or need information about a schedule change, they want to know they’re being heard. The NJ TRANSIT social team works to respond and communicate with empathy and accuracy, which often requires collaboration with other departments. For example, they are currently working with their IT department to build a comprehensive response team in Sprout. Sprout’s Tasks feature in the Inbox helps make that collaboration seamless.

If, for instance, they receive a message on social about a problem with their mobile app, the social team can assign a Task to the IT Sprout user. Then, that person will look into the issue and provide context or an answer to the social team in Sprout. The social team will polish the copy and respond to the customer.

“I am in love with the Task feature. It ensures that all the information we need in order to respond stays with the right message, ” said Mack. “Before using Sprout, we’d have to copy and paste from the platform we had into email and vice versa.” For someone like Mack, who gets around 400 emails a day, keeping that thread of information separate within Sprout is essential.

The results are in

According to the Sprout Social Index™, 76% of customers expect a response from a brand in the first 24 hours of sending their message. In the first half of 2021, NJ TRANSIT exceeded those expectations maintaining an average first reply time of 30 minutes.

It’s not just the Smart Inbox that speeds up processes for the NJ TRANSIT team. “Sprout has amazing analytics tools that we didn’t have access to with our last management platform. Now, we run engagement reports for our senior vice president of communications and customer service, monthly reports for our board, weekly communication reports, response reports and more,” said Minott. “Sprout has allowed us to do this with ease.”

“To give you an idea, Kevin used to spend three days on reports that now take three hours,” Mack continued. “We used to have to calculate response time manually because in our old platform, it would count us as being non-responsive when we were offline. With Sprout, we can put work hours in so the Engagement Report calculates our real response rate for us.”

Sprout Social, at your service 

Customer care and experience are what NJ TRANSIT’s brand is all about. When selecting a new social media management platform, they were looking for a software and team that would give them the same level of support. High-quality customer care was an important deciding factor in their decision to work with Sprout.

“Where Sprout came out on top was understanding us and treating us as individuals. They didn’t give us a one-size-fits-all approach or treat us like anyone else. We’re a transportation agency, so we have different needs, and that understanding of who we are really matters,” said Mack. “Every time we reach out, Sprout gives us the same customer care that we were promised from the first time we spoke to them. They really are just 100% there for us.”

Our team of experts will always respect your unique needs and treat your business with care. Start a free, 30-day trial today or request a demo to get a customized tour from our team.

The post Sprout Social helps keep NJ TRANSIT’s social strategy on track appeared first on Sprout Social.

When MeUndies was founded in 2011, it was the first brand to offer an online underwear subscription. By the end of 2020, the brand had sold 16 million pairs of underwear. Between the brand’s Instagram shop, product tags, ads and rich influencer network, Instagram has long been, and continues to be, a fundamental part of that business growth. Such a robust social commerce strategy needs a customer care strategy to match.

When TK Lynch joined MeUndies as the Social Media Support Coordinator, he built a dedicated customer care strategy tailored for social. “Our philosophy is that if any problems come up for our customers, we want our brand to feel like a friend who’s on their side,” said Lynch. “We want to create an experience that doesn’t feel like you’re dealing with a customer service representative. Social allows us to create a customer experience that’s personable and casual, while still being effective.”

MeUndies’ customer care strategy encompasses social channels, but Instagram is where their customers most actively seek support, especially via Instagram Direct Messages (DMs). Until recently, Lynch and his team managed Instagram DMs and Story Replies natively, which created a host of issues. But now, with the help of Sprout Social’s Instagram messaging features, MeUndies’ team delivers customer care with greater efficiency, flexibility and accountability.

The need for speed

The Sprout Social Index™ Edition XVI: Above & Beyond found that 40% of consumers expect brands to respond within the first hour of reaching out on social media. TK initially had the same expectation for MeUndies. When he joined the team, the goal for the social customer care program was to respond within one hour for all message types, across all channels.

When the team handled Instagram messages natively, agents had to manually log responses and calculate response time in a Google Sheet, which was cumbersome. Now, Sprout’s Smart Inbox collects all inbound Instagram direct messages, mentions and comments in a single stream.

To say they’re crushing their initial one-hour to response goal would be an understatement. Between February 1 and March 31, 2021, alone, MeUndies received over 12,000 inbound Instagram messages, 24% of which were direct messages, and maintained an average first reply time of 19 minutes.

They no longer have to manually calculate those metrics either. “Having Instagram DMs in Sprout has really enhanced our customer support efforts. Our response metrics are all calculated within Sprout, which gives a clearer picture of how we are doing on Instagram and how that stacks up against our other social channels,” said Lynch.

Collaboration tools everyone can get behind

MeUndies often has three agents, along with Lynch, working to resolve customer service inquiries on Instagram at the same time. When the team was still doing so natively, they had to be careful not to duplicate efforts or overtake another agent’s conversation.

Previously, there were no time stamps on individual messages and no visibility into which agent sent each message. Customers would see read receipts, so in instances where MeUndies needed more time to craft a response, it would appear as if they’d left the customer on read. Those are all issues Sprout’s Instagram DMs integration solved.

“Now, we can easily see who has responded in a long message history. Our team members can also easily assign messages as Tasks to themselves or another agent if their shift is ending,” said Lynch. “Even the little things like collision warnings in Sprout, which tell us when another agent is typing a reply, are critical to us. These features have made an immense difference in the overall quality of our customer care.”

Message tagging is also highly valuable to MeUndies as it helps the customer experience team track different inquiry types and gives leadership across the organization visibility into what is happening on social.

“We tag everything. So, if someone asked us about billing issues that we’ve resolved on Instagram, for example, we could easily pull the Tag Report and share that data with them,” said Lynch. “We’re also in the process of syncing this with our entire company so that data funnels into a centralized system. That’s going to give leadership a really good top-down view, and they quickly see how our customers on social relate and differ from customers reaching out on our other support channels.”

Underwear and customer care for every body

With Sprout Social, MeUndies’ Instagram customer care strategy is more seamless, consistent and personalized. “Our mindset at MeUndies is to embrace being unique. We carry that passion over to social. We never just copy and paste responses even if there’s a standard answer,” said Lynch. “Now that our workflow is integrated into Sprout and we’ve eliminated manual processes, we can focus on what really matters: providing the best customer experience possible.”

Learn how your business can benefit from Sprout Social’s customer care and messaging capabilities. Request a free hands-on demo today.

The post How MeUndies weaves customer care into the fabric of their brand appeared first on Sprout Social.

TUI is the UK’s leading travel brand, serving millions of customers each year as they embark on holidays, flights and cruises all over the world. And with more than two million people following TUI UK and First Choice, a subsidiary of TUI, on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, that’s a lot of holidaymakers to keep track of.

TUI UK’s social media networks are an essential connection point between the brand and its customers. On one side of social, the brand team prioritizes engagement, reaching new audiences, promoting their offerings and creating transparent content for their customers.

“We focus a lot on building confidence in TUI by being as transparent as possible about our offerings. We’re always drilling into what people are saying about our brand to understand key themes and sentiment, which informs parts of our content,” said Naomi Bressan, Social Community Manager for TUI UK and Ireland.

On the other side of social, TUI has a dedicated customer service team. The travel industry revolves around customer experience, and if things don’t go to plan, delivering top-tier customer service is a must. As social media becomes the primary destination for customer service, TUI uses Sprout Social to ensure its Facebook, Twitter and Instagram bases are covered.

When the global pandemic hit, we received customer queries on an unprecedented scale. Sprout enabled us to get our teams up and running as quickly as possible, with the Sprout customer support team going above and beyond to help us when we needed it most.

Nicola Smith
Senior Social Marketing Manager, TUI UK & Ireland

Creating stronger a customer support system amid global travel disruptions

The start of the new decade kicked off swimmingly for the TUI team. But then, COVID-19 took everyone by surprise and completely disrupted the global travel industry.

In February 2020, TUI received 53,900 messages across their TUI UK and First Choice social channels. By the end of March, that number increased by 269% to more than 198,000 messages.

At the time, TUI UK had 30 customer service agents, along with support from the Brand Social team, managing the increasingly overwhelming number of inbound social messages. As call volumes increased many customer service agents were moved to answer inbound calls so 61 people from across TUI volunteered to assist.

Sprout also provided immediate customer support, offering TUI UK additional user seats and efficient training for the volunteers.

“When the global pandemic hit, we received customer queries on an unprecedented scale. Sprout enabled us to get our teams up and running as quickly as possible, with the Sprout customer support team going above and beyond to help us when we needed it most,” said Nicola Smith, Senior Social Marketing Manager for TUI UK and Ireland .

Shifting gears to serve new content 

As the customer service team worked its way through the Sprout Smart Inbox each day, they’d tag inbound messages to categorize inquiries and keep track of recurring themes and topics. Meanwhile, as TUI’s brand team adjusted their content strategy, they were able to use insights from tag data to determine which kinds of content they should prioritize and proactively communicate.

Interspersed among posts about TUI’s dream destinations, they began sharing content highlighting new TUI policies, health and safety measures, refund information, travel advice and more.

TUI’s team also uses social listening to influence their content strategy, monitor brand health and glean insights about their competitors. “We regularly report on sentiment around our brand and in Sprout, we can see where there are dips and spikes. Then we can click in to view those messages to understand what’s happening and why,” said Bressan.

With regard to their competitors, TUI looks at sentiment, emerging topics and their own share of voice in travel-related conversations. “If people are asking about luggage, trip amendments or specific destinations, for example, we can see how frequently people are talking about us, compared to our competitors,” said Bressan.

Returning to high days and holidays

With Sprout’s powerful social solutions, TUI UK continues to connect with customers, navigate change and overcome new challenges.

“The Smart Inbox capability, along with Message Tagging, helped us to respond to over 500,000 customer queries in three months with a remote team of 61 people. We could not have done it without Sprout,” said Smith.

Sprout’s Engagement Report, which tracks response rate and reply times and the Inbox Team Report, which customer care metrics at an individual level, give everyone on the TUI team visibility into customer service performance.

In Sprout’s Tag Report, TUI can easily analyze the performance of specific content themes like “COVID content,” which garnered more than 28 million impressions and 3 million engagements between March 1, 2020 and August 31, 2020.

“I couldn’t recommend Sprout enough. Sprout support is so easy and quick,” said Bressan. “It’s got everything that social marketers and customer support teams could want all in one place, which makes it easier to do the job at hand.”

Take your content and customer care to new heights with Sprout Social. Request a personalized demo or start your free 30-day trial today!

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The university embraces social media as a way to connect with those communities and tell the Texas A&M story far and wide.

“People take their passion for the university to the internet, so over the last several years, we’ve been able to tap into that online community and grow it,” said Krista Berend, the Director of Social Media at Texas A&M.

Sprout Social helps Texas A&M effectively manage that growth at scale, which is important when your institution has 16 academic colleges and schools, 19 NCAA sports and hundreds of departments.

“We manage five different brands outside our institutional accounts. Sprout has been great for us because we can see all of those brands’ social in one place,” said Berend.

Telling the Texas A&M story through content

Social media content is critical when it comes to telling the Texas A&M story, but more than that, it helps Berend and her team build emotional connections with their community. Like a lot of social media teams, Berend prioritizes engagement and reach for their content goals, but also carefully considers timing and the feelings of the audience before publishing to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn or Reddit.

“We think a lot about our content, how it’s delivered and the mindset of people when they’re receiving it so we can make a positive brand impression. We think about how our audience might feel compelled to share because the content impacted them in some way or hit them in the right spot,” said Berend.

Sprout Social’s publishing suite gives Berend and her team a platform to collaborate on content creation, discuss strategy and provide feedback all in one place. “Our student interns are incredibly active and constantly creating content. Being able to correct things, give them feedback and just talk things out all within Sprout’s platform has been great,” said Berend. “It also helps those interns feel more actively involved when they can see everything that’s going on. Those features that facilitate collaboration have been critical for us.”

Collaboration also helps Texas A&M overcome decentralization, a common challenge among higher ed institutions. “We combat decentralization by creating relationships and being a resource for other departments or teams in the Texas A&M system that are working in social,” said Berend. “Recently, for example, we got a message in Sprout about our recreational sports center. Even though the message wasn’t directed to the Texas A&M rec sports social channels, we were able to pass it along to the right people because we’ve built the relationship.”

Tagging gives content themes and topics equal playtime

Tracking content themes and performance is critical for such a massive institution, and Sprout’s Tag Report has been particularly useful for Texas A&M.

“Tagging our content has helped us ensure that our content is equally distributed across our many departments, divisions and academic colleges. Looking at the Tag Report, we can see if we’re skewing too much toward one college, sport or event versus another. Then, based on that data we can self-correct and diversify our content,” said Berend.

The importance of accessibility

Texas A&M is committed to creating engaging and diversified content, and it’s equally important that their content is accessible. Sprout’s accessibility features were a big factor in their decision to become Sprout customers.

“Creating accessible content has been a priority of our team for several years, and things like including image descriptions are just part of our workflow. With the software we were using before, we had to do all of that natively across social channels,” said Berend. “With Sprout we can do all of that within the platform, which makes our workflow so much easier. Plus, as social channels add more accessibility features, we’ve noticed that Sprout almost immediately has those in the back end for us to use.”

A big school making a big impact on social media

Texas A&M’s mission to build more engaged social communities is accomplished with Sprout’s cost-effective platform which facilitates collaboration and gives a comprehensive view of the social landscape all in one platform.

In just six months, between August 2020 and January 2021,  Texas A&M earned over 131 million impressions and 8.3 million content engagements across Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram. And their community just keeps growing, with an average of just over 13,000 followers gained monthly. Gig ’em, Aggies!

Discover what your higher ed institution can accomplish with Sprout Social. Start a free trial today.

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Online fandoms are notorious for being extremely impassioned groups, and on social media that passion often translates to engagements. When WTDY-FM Philadelphia announced the contest using the hashtag #ArtistOfTheSummer, they unleashed the power of those fan communities, engaging fans of nearly every Top 40 artist and/or group.

Using Sprout’s Social Listening through nine rounds of the competitive voting poll, the radio station wrangled millions of messages, measured their poll results and converted social engagement into growth for each brand platform and touchpoint.

Social listening meets loyal listeners

For the #ArtistOfTheSummer initiative, 96.5 (WTDY-FM) Philadelphia chose 44 artists to kick off the voting. Then, over the course of nine rounds, they used social listening to narrow the field.

To vote on Twitter and Instagram, fans had to tag the radio station’s handle, include an artist’s name and include #ArtistOfTheSummer. Those requirements aligned with the station’s query set up in Sprout’s Social Listening, so all submissions on social were automatically captured. To drive even more fan engagement and expand their social communities, they incentivized Retweets and follows, making them worth additional points toward an artist.

At the end of every weekly round of voting, they used the Conversation Overview table in Sprout to tally the messages received and aggregated by keyword. Every message received and recorded in volume counted as a vote for that Artist in that round.

In addition to filtering results to focus on each artist in the competition, the station’s social team examined the conversation around #ArtistOfTheSummer as a whole, even beyond insights that directly related to their poll. The topic query also aggregated messages and keywords for MTV’s Hottest Summer Superstar competition, which also used a hashtag-based voting system. This is a great example of how brands can use social listening to surface insights about simultaneous, competing events and a shared audience, which in this case is Top 40 fans.

And the winner is…

By the end of the contest, the radio station’s Sprout Listening Topic captured a total of 21.9 million messages shared by over 637,000 unique authors, and the hashtag had trended on Twitter multiple times. Former One Direction member Louis Tomlinson was ultimately crowned the 2020 #ArtistOfTheSummer.

And the station won big as well. During the course of the competitive voting poll, 96.5 (WTDY-FM) Philadelphia gained more than 168,000 new followers on Twitter, garnered more than 17 million engagements on Twitter and Instagram and gained immeasurable insights about their listeners and can fine-tune their content to exactly what their new audience enjoys.

With social listening, 96.5 (WTDY-FM) Philadelphia and Entercom find ways to reach far beyond local markets and gain new fans around the world. And when it comes to choosing the right tool, it’s no competition.

Create, manage and analyze your winning social media strategy with Sprout Social. Request your free demo today!

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Using Sprout’s Smart Inbox to send the right message

The unique nature of Inspire’s sleep apnea treatment drives a lot of interest and by extension, a lot of questions. Inspire has a small social team, but the Sprout Smart Inbox makes it possible for them to review and react to every inbound comment, private message or mention. Whether reacting means responding directly, assigning the message to a colleague or simply checking it off their review list, it’s all done within the Smart Inbox.

“Before I started at Inspire, the team had been monitoring natively. It’s so easy to miss things and let important conversations slip through the cracks that way,” said Inspire’s Social Media Community Manager Emily Allen. “When I joined the team, I recommended using Sprout to ensure we could be attentive on social. Initially I spent about 90% of my day in the inbox answering and saving all our audience’s questions, which was a great way to learn the business.”

Allen started as a team of one but gradually got more support, including an additional teammate and two agencies to assist with Inspire’s paid and organic social. Each person with a seat in the platform has the ability to task and tag messages in the inbox. If Allen’s teammates run into a question or comment they’re unable to address, they can simply task it to her.

Additionally, the team has Inbox Rules set up to automatically tag messages that align with a specific theme like insurance or cost, for example. Then, they can report on trends and commonalities within those message themes, identify the most frequently asked questions from potential patients and inform the focus of their content.

Providing critical customer care, stat

To address FAQs, Inspire relies on Saved Replies, available on the Advanced plan and stored in Sprout’s Asset Library. Once they’ve selected a scripted response as their jumping-off point, they customize their responses to incorporate their own personality, add emojis and sign their names. All of these capabilities enable seamless collaboration and more accurate and efficient customer service.

In an industry like healthcare, where patients will reach out with concerns related to their care, responding quickly is crucial. When the coronavirus pandemic began, patients faced new challenges with accessing care, so Allen set up Sprout’s COVID-19 Inbox Rule Template to identify all relevant messages. Understanding common concerns and roadblocks patients were facing helped Allen and her team develop new assets and response scripts covering telemedicine and patient safety.

Some of the VIP lists require immediate attention. The Inbox Rules we have set up ensure that any time someone from that list comments, I get an email so I can address it right away.

Emily Allen
Social Media Community Manager

VIP lists are another Sprout automation that ensures that important messages are addressed quickly.

“We love the VIP list. It helps us pay special attention to interactions with patients who reach out frequently, promising leads, brand ambassadors, our doctors and even people who bring unpleasant messages into our community,” said Allen. “Some of the VIP lists require immediate attention. The Inbox Rules we have set up ensure that any time someone from that list comments, I get an email so I can address it right away.”

The payoff is inspiring

The attentiveness and intentionality behind Inspire’s customer service is exceptional, and they had a 71% reply rate in Q2 2020 to prove it. Bolstered by Sprout’s robust capabilities, Inspire continues to provide the top-rate care people need to breathe normally and sleep peacefully.

The post Sprout Social is a breath of fresh air for Inspire Medical Systems appeared first on Sprout Social.