New at Hootsuite: Customer Care, Inbox, and Amplify Updates (Q1 2021)
As we head into the second quarter of 2021, I hope everyone is keeping well. Our team at Hootsuite continues to show just what can be achieved while working remotely and so far we’ve already launched a whole suite of updates, and made an exciting acquisition that has the potential to reinvent how your business manages customer care.
Before diving in, I wanted to begin by outlining where we’re focusing our efforts this year:
- One Hootsuite: We’re working to provide a cohesive and streamlined user experience with the tools our customers need to be successful.
- Personalized guidance: We’re adding more context and actionability to the platform to give customers more support using the features and functionalities available.
- Social network depth: As the networks continue to evolve, we’re working hard to provide the most up-to-date channel capabilities.
- Time-saving workflows: This is a longer-term priority for our product teams to help customers increase efficiency, productivity, and collaboration.
- Extensibility: We’re deepening our focus on two-way integrations with the systems that matter most to our customers.
- Clear ROI: We’re committed to helping all of our customers measure the success of their social media initiatives.
- Integrated paid and organic: We continue to work on ways to create a seamless experience for managing paid campaigns and organic content together from within Hootsuite.
Our priority is always on features and updates that deliver a reliable, secure, and modern experience to all our customers. So let’s look at what’s new, starting with our promise to help you connect more of the customer conversation journey.
Bonus: Get a free social media strategy template to quickly and easily plan your own strategy. Also use it to track results and present the plan to your boss, teammates, and clients.
The future of customer care
The pandemic has changed many of the rules of business. People now send more 1:1 messages than ever before—and they still expect lightning quick responses. And, with both customers and reps working remotely, brands suddenly need more out of their customer service tools.
We’re reimagining that customer care experience with our acquisition of Sparkcentral, a platform that helps the world’s most customer-focused brands deliver exceptional service via social and messaging channels including SMS, WhatsApp, live chat, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and others.
Sparkcentral by Hootsuite helps you build personal connections in the moments that matter the most to your audience on the social and messaging channels they already use, unlocking value at scale. The platform supports every step of the digital conversation journey:
- Connect: Speak with customers on their channel of choice and manage expectations with SLAs and agent availability.
- Enrich: Connect to customer relationship management (CRM) or contact data platforms to keep information in sync for effective omnichannel case management, and connect to knowledge management systems for cost-effective self-serve case resolution. Automatically log social tickets to CRM systems for a 360-degree view of customer interactions. Support automated case routing and resolution via virtual agents and chatbots.
- Route and Prioritize: Organize your teams and queues based on who can best respond to each customer, with automatic identification of high priority tickets by assessing customer information, topic, and sentiment.
- Engage: Asynchronous conversation workflows ensure the experience is centred around the way the customer wants to interact with your brand while cross-channel conversation history provides a consolidated view of each customer across all channels. Improve efficiency with workflows for high volumes and collision control and provide proactive customer service with relevant information at key moments, like shipping or appointment updates.
- Analyze: Everything that happens in Sparkcentral is tracked and the reporting is tailored to the roles in your contact centre with powerful real-time dashboard, reports, exports, and insights to measure performance and quality across your workforce.
What does this look like when it comes together? Axa Insurance implemented a messaging-first strategy using Sparkcentral. The team now handles insurance claims through WhatsApp and, in the event of a collision, clients simply scan the QR code on their insurance card to be automatically connected to an Axa agent for assistance.
This new approach took the team only four weeks to get up and running, and 75% of Axa WhatsApp customers give a top recommendation score of 9.5/10.
We’ll be releasing more details about Sparkcentral, so stay tuned to our What’s New page.
Now for the rest of our most recent changes, which are categorized into four key groups: customer connections, workforce activation, risk mitigation, and social management.
Boost customer connections with messaging
These changes are focused on helping you to build meaningful connections and engage with your customers and prospects through social media.
Inbox updates
We’ve added Twitter mentions to Inbox, so you can engage with Twitter mentions and replies alongside conversations from other social networks. Plus, team performance is also now available in Analytics.
We also launched new message templates to help enrich your communications.
Support for Facebook Messenger inbound message templates allows you to direct customer responses via generic and button templates from Facebook Messenger right in Hootsuite Inbox. This provides additional context on these conversations and is especially useful if you use chatbots.
Know when to publish
Ever wondered about when you should post on your social channels? Now Hootsuite can tell you. Our new publishing suggestions and insights in Hootsuite Analytics gives you data-driven suggestions about the best time to post.
You can also choose a specific goal to get suggestions on the best time to post to achieve it. Options include:
- Customer Advocacy (engagement)
- Brand Growth (impressions)
- Lead Generation (link clicks)
There’s lots to explore—head to your Hootsuite Analytics dashboard to get started.
Making admin easy
You may have noticed some improvements in Planner has changed. It’s now easier to duplicate and edit posts with fewer clicks.
We know how important it is that your content goes out when it’s meant to. To help you stay connected and ensure your posts are successful, we’ve added detailed guidance when a social platform error that prevents your post from publishing. Look to the Composer and Planner for a full explanation of why the error occurred and how you can prevent similar errors in the future.
Activate your workforce with Amplify
Employee Amplify users now have a calendar view for the first time ever. See all of your scheduled Amplify posts in one place, so you can manage your content and plan how to effectively reach your networks. Easily edit, reschedule, or delete a post right from the calendar view.
And there are new updates for Amplify admins too.
The secret to scaling an employee advocacy program is to understand what’s going well and how you can replicate it.
With new Amplify adoption reporting, you can track performance and see who’s using the platform and who isn’t. Use aggregate date and time-range reports to make informed decisions about how to re-engage users or optimize Amplify usage.
Plus, enjoy a more integrated social selling experience with the new Amplify Everywhere integration. Now you can leverage the tools your team is already using, like Microsoft Sharepoint.
Mitigate risks with security and pause
The events of the past year have shown how important it is to act quickly in a crisis, and social media is no exception. With that in mind, we introduced a feature that allows organization admins to suspend scheduled posts and resume them later.
With Hootsuite, you can rest easy knowing your social content is secured and monitored with centralized governance and oversight. Taking action is simple if anything unexpected does come your way. Access these features in ‘social networks and teams’ under My Profile.
Efficient and effective social management
We introduced three new features to improve your workflows last quarter.
Firstly, we added enhancements to auto-tagging. If you’re an Impact customer, when you publish a post via Computer the auto-tagger will pull campaign data into Impact for easy filtering. Explore the filtering options from Impact Content in Hootsuite Analytics.
Next, we’re helping you enrich sales and customer care processes with social data from Hootsuite and HubSpot. This has been a top request and we’re pleased to announce that customers can now add social context to HubSpot sales and customer care processes directly from Hootsuite.
Lastly, we updated the Microsoft Dynamics 365 App. Joint customers can now use the app’s features with Instagram Business, in addition to Twitter and Facebook. To download this or the HubSpot app, head to the Hootsuite App Directory.
Empowering you to get the most out of Hootsuite
Whatever your goals are on social media, Hootsuite can help. Use our platform to build customer connections, provide the digital intelligence you need to better understand the conversations your audience is having, activate your workforce to most effectively leverage social, and mitigate risks to keep your brand and employees protected.
Curious about one or more of these new features? Ask to see Hootsuite in action with a custom live demo.
Got feedback? We’d love to know what you think about this quarter’s updates—simply get in touch with our team.
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