A growing need for a more cultivated social customer care approach

Responsive customer care is paramount for today’s consumers. Nearly three-quarters expect brands to respond within 24 hours or less, according to The Sprout Social Index™. Yet, ScottsMiracle-Gro found themselves grappling with response times that stretched into days or even a week, a delay that wilted customer satisfaction and brand perception. Their previous system, a tangled web of multiple different platforms, created inefficiencies and frustrated agents.

“It was insane,” recalls Sara Smith, Manager of Consumer Services at ScottsMiracle-Gro. “They were using 8 to 10 different systems on any given day…It made their job so much more complex than it needed to be.” After she joined the team, their social team quickly onboarded with Salesforce and social was one of the first integrations.

Unlocking the potential of social care with Sprout’s Salesforce Service Cloud integration

ScottsMiracle-Gro sought a solution to streamline their social media management and enhance customer care. They had other options but ultimately chose Sprout Social. The seamless integration of Sprout Social with Salesforce Service Cloud helped transform their social media management. Along with Sprout’s stellar social media management tools, its social data has the unique ability to flow right into Salesforce.

It was a game changer. Social training used to be a whole day thing, now it’s an hour. The system is so user intuitive. That’s one of our favorite things about it.

Sara Smith
Manager of Consumer Services

This integration dramatically simplified ScottsMiracle-Gro’s internal workflows, eliminating the need for agents to hop between systems. Before, agents had to swivel between platforms to adequately assist a customer. Now, all of that can be done in one place. It also provided a consolidated hub for reporting and analytics, giving ScottsMiracle-Gro valuable data-driven insights to nurture their social media strategies proactively.

The power of integration: ScottsMiracle-Gro’s recipe for social success

The impact of Sprout Social was immediate and far-reaching. “It literally was cutting our social agent’s time in half instantly,” says Smith. They saw a 50% decrease in the time it took to resolve a case. This newfound efficiency empowered their team to take action much more frequently, resulting in a remarkable 381% increase in their action rate.

By centralizing all social media interactions within Service Cloud, agents are able to view and respond to messages from various platforms in one location.

Our agents do almost everything in Salesforce now, including social, thanks to the integration with Sprout.

Sara Smith
Manager of Consumer Services

Average time to action is down 91%. This dramatic improvement allows agents to provide more personalized and effective support, as they now have a more comprehensive view of each customer’s history and preferences.

Beyond the significant time savings, ScottsMiracle-Gro also saw improvements in agent satisfaction and retention, a direct result of a more streamlined and manageable workflow. The integration empowered ScottsMiracle-Gro to not only enhance the customer experience, but also successfully navigate unexpected viral social moments, demonstrating the agility and responsiveness that Sprout Social enables.

“When I started, agents would beg to not have to manage social customer care tickets. Now, agents proactively ask to work on social tickets because of how much more efficient the process is,” says Smith. “I love that for the job quality of my agents. For me, it helps retain people and improves my own job satisfaction.”

Social insights for sustainable growth

ScottsMiracle-Gro’s success story underscores the transformative power of Sprout Social and Salesforce Service Cloud. Sprout’s intuitive interface, coupled with the seamless customer service management in Salesforce Service Cloud, has enabled ScottsMiracle-Gro to cultivate a thriving social media presence while prioritizing employee satisfaction and development.

Ready to see how Sprout Social can help your business blossom in the digital age? Request a personalized demo today.

The post ScottsMiracle-Gro empowers agents and cultivates brand loyalty with Sprout Social’s Salesforce Service Cloud integration appeared first on Sprout Social.

“We exist to help Australian farmers increase their profitability and sustainability,” said Danielle Gault, Communications Manager – West for GRDC. “We help them do that by investing in RD&E projects and communicating the outcomes of this research back to them through various channels, including social media. They use the information to improve their farming systems and make them more profitable and sustainable.”

Communicating to a seemingly niche audience might sound straightforward, too—but that’s not the case for GRDC. “We serve all grain growers in Australia, which means our primary audience is demographically broad—from young growers straight out of university to experienced growers in their 60s and 70s,” Gault explained. “All these groups use social media in very different ways. So, our main challenge is to communicate messages in a multilayered way, from 30-second Reels to in-depth, 1,000-word articles, so that we can deliver value to our entire audience, which also includes researchers.”

How can Gault and two other colleagues effectively meet this challenge, given that none are focused solely on social media management for GRDC? They rely on Sprout Social, which the organization has used for nearly a decade. “Sprout lets us post at a high frequency across multiple channels, but in a structured and considered way that is based around our specific goals for each platform,” Gault said.

Sprout isn’t just supporting our social strategy—it’s making it happen. Sprout allows us to perform at a level above what you might expect for a small social team with limited resources. We get a lot of high-quality content out to our audiences every week. We trial, test and measure. And we track and adapt to trends quickly.

Danielle Gault
Communications Manager - West

Using Sprout’s reporting to identify top-performing content and track audience feedback

Grain growers in Australia have more than a passing interest in GRDC’s work. They help fund it through levies on the agricultural products they grow, including wheat, coarse grains like barley, pulses such as chickpeas, and oilseeds like canola. The Australian government also invests in GRDC by matching growers’ levy contributions up to a certain percentage. It has a similar co-investment model for the 14 other Rural Research and Development Corporations (RDCs) in the country, including Dairy Australia and Wine Australia.

Gault, GRDC’s communications manager for the entire western region of Australia, said she is amazed “by the scale and breadth of what the organization does.” As of early 2025, that work includes investing in more than 800 different RD&E projects, many of them multiyear in scope and conducted in collaboration with universities or science agencies.

Keeping grain growers and other interested parties informed about these projects and other news and topics of interest requires GRDC to publish fact sheets, videos, podcasts, its flagship magazine, Groundcover Online, and other content online and offline. It also hosts numerous events throughout the year, from webinars to workshops. GRDC’s channels on Facebook, Instagram, X, YouTube and LinkedIn play a crucial role in helping the organization to promote its wide and diverse range of content and events—and also, elevate brand awareness.

“Part of our organizational success metric is ensuring that grain growers are aware of the projects we do, and the work their levies are funding,” said Gault. “We monitor both traditional and social media to gauge attribution for the projects that GRDC invests in.”

Tagging and Reporting in Sprout helps Gault and her cohorts to identify which content is hitting the mark with audiences on social and easily share results with key stakeholders, including GRDCs executive team. “Our leadership team is particularly interested in understanding the specific content that is getting the most engagement—especially since we changed our strategy from primarily pushing out information to our audiences to trying to engage more with them.”

That shift in approach includes finding opportunities to use humor when appropriate. One win that Gault highlighted to leadership in a Post Performance Report from Sprout was a punny post from 2023 about “cropping.” It went viral, earning a reach of 3.5 million and 60,000 engagements.

This post was an installment of GRDC’s “Friday Funny” series, which Gault and her team launched in 2022 to engage audiences by offering a lighthearted take on grain growers’ vocation. The series is also intended to help GRDC take a break from its content offerings that are typically technical and dense.

“At the end of a busy day, people may not be in the headspace to read Ph.D.-level content about plant breeding,” Gault said with a laugh. “So, we need to package up what GRDC does in a way that’s easy for our primary audience to absorb and that also helps build awareness for our brand and attract new audiences, too.”

With Sprout’s Reporting, we can bundle insights from across channels and understand what is working well and what’s not. The reports have become essential to informing our content and social strategies. I even generate reports specifically on our podcast and video social performance.

Danielle Gault
Communications Manager - West

Measuring success and making plans to optimize content for different platforms

For the past few years, Gault and her team have been on the front line of helping GRDC to transform its social strategy and social brand voice to a more engagement-focused, content-driven strategy. And according to Gault, that includes using more storytelling, in addition to more humor.

“Grower stories and case studies are absolutely, by far, our most popular content,” she said. “It’s that peer learning element. Farmers want to know what other farmers are doing, and what their successes and challenges are. And they want to learn about new technology or new research in the language that growers use.”

Gault said GRDC has also been experimenting more with video, especially short-form video. “We’ve had to work very hard to bring that strategy into social with our team’s limited time and resources. But in the past 18 months, we’re much more active in the Reels space on Instagram and with Shorts on YouTube. We’ve already had some successes, like our video for National Agriculture Day that had sweeping shots of paddocks and farm machinery, farmers at work and rock music.”

Gault said that video received a lot of positive feedback, including from people who took the time to send emails to GRDC to say how much they loved the content. “That was such a nice outcome,” she reflected. “It doesn’t often happen that you get social feedback outside of social! It signaled to us that we are heading in the right direction.”

More proof of success came in the form of performance metrics for 2023, which showed that the GRDC was realizing strong overall returns from its new social media strategy. Gault shared some of these metrics, which were gathered using Sprout:

• 101% growth in video views
• 79% increase in impressions
• 63% boost in engagements

“We essentially doubled our video views, which we were excited about,” said Gault. “In 2023, we also saw audience growth of 13.9% across all the channels we use. And for some specific channels, the rate was significantly higher. For example, our audience growth on LinkedIn was 37.5% in 2023.”

Looking ahead, Gault says she is eager for GRDC to take a more rigorous approach to optimizing content for each social media platform it uses and experimenting with strategies that appeal best to the different generations of growers the organization needs to reach through those various channels.

“Sprout is very good at helping us to be strategic with our approach. It gives us such a nice clear snapshot of what’s happening across our channels,” Gault said. “Sprout helps us choose optimal posting times and ensure that we don’t put out too much content or overlap efforts. We’d have to do all this manually otherwise, which I just don’t think would be possible for our small team.”

To find out how Sprout Social can help you make the most of your resources to optimize content and increase audience engagement across all your social channels, request your free demo today.

Sprout’s core features for publishing, community management, reporting and listening are essential to our team. And because we publish a high volume of posts—3,615 in 2024 alone—we find the publishing and scheduling tools in Sprout exceptionally useful.

Danielle Gault
Communications Manager - West

The post How Sprout helps GRDC increase engagement with multiple generations of Australia’s grain farmers appeared first on Sprout Social.

When Jillian Wallace joined Randstad as their U.S. Social Lead in 2023, she found their social media presence stuck in the past. “Think social media 2014,” she recalls, “Very safe. A lot of stock photography, very reliant on sending people to links to blogs, links to case studies.” It was a far cry from the dynamic, engaging content needed to capture the attention of today’s job seekers and employers.

Adding to the challenge were Randstad’s strict brand guidelines and limited budget for social media. Jillian faced an uphill battle to modernize their approach and convince stakeholders of the value of a social-first strategy.

Unlocking efficiency and collaboration with Sprout Social

Determined to transform Randstad’s social media presence, Jillian partnered with marketing agency Nebo for a complete overhaul of the social strategy, with Sprout Social as a key platform to facilitate this change. Nebo, a Sprout Social customer familiar with its collaborative features and robust reporting capabilities, was confident it was the ideal platform to elevate Randstad’s social media presence. With Sprout’s powerful tools and intuitive interface, they were finally equipped to tackle Randstad’s unique challenges.

[Sprout Social] is the elite social media management tool.

Jillian Wallace
Social Media & Content Director, Randstad

“From a collaboration perspective, and as data-driven social media marketers…there’s really no beating the Reporting,” says Jarno Oostingh, Senior Director of Social & PR at Nebo.

This robust reporting is complemented by powerful tools like Sprout’s Smart Inbox, which streamlines Randstad’s community management and allows for efficient responses to comments and messages across multiple platforms. This proved crucial for addressing problems and managing their online reputation, especially given the high volume of interactions they receive daily.

Measuring social media success at Randstad

With Sprout’s robust analytics, Jillian could finally track the impact of their social efforts and prove ROI to stakeholders. “The data [from Sprout Social] shows how incredible the work has been as far as driving engagement, impressions and follower growth,” she shares. “All of the numbers are honestly exceptional.”

The efficiency, collaboration and insight from working with Sprout Social on Randstad’s social media presence was significant.

Jarno Oostingh
Senior Director of Social & PR, Nebo

With Sprout’s help, Randstad’s social media community grew by over 400%, and they saved 60 hours per month on community management after implementing Sprout’s Smart Inbox. Moreover, they achieved a 45% social media engagement growth in 18 months. But the transformation went beyond numbers. Sprout Social empowered Randstad to become a true social-first organization, creating engaging content that resonated with their audience and strengthened their brand.

Jillian’s favorite part? “The automation of it all,” she says. “Having your templated responses, having the community management in there…[and] crisis management is a huge thing here.”

The transformation in Randstad’s social media presence is evident in their content. “It allowed us to put significant effort towards creating social-forward content, even when speaking about a serious topic like workplace safety” says Jarno, pointing out a comparison of Randstad’s posts before and after implementing Sprout Social:

A partnership for success

With Sprout Social as their foundation, Randstad and Nebo built a powerful partnership that propelled their social media strategy to new heights. The platform’s ease of use and collaborative features foster seamless teamwork, allowing them to focus on strategy and creative execution. As Jillian points out, “The collaboration piece is really a time saver, especially when you’re working with an agency partner. [Having the right platform] takes a lot of that very manual stuff off of my plate.”

For agencies, “the right technology helps you invest more time in refining strategy and creative to achieve ambitious goals,” Jarno suggests.

Sprout’s comprehensive toolset, including Employee Advocacy and Social Listening, further streamlined their workflow and maximized their impact. By consolidating their efforts within a single platform, they achieved a level of efficiency and effectiveness that’d have been impossible before.

The future is social for Randstad

Today, Randstad stands as a shining example of how even the largest organizations can transform their social media presence with the right tools and strategy. Sprout Social has empowered them to connect with their audience in more meaningful ways, build stronger relationships and achieve remarkable results.

Sprout is such an incredibly well-rounded tool. It’s sophisticated, and its Reporting—there’s really no beating it.

Jillian Wallace
Social Media & Content Director, Randstad

If you’re ready to unlock the full potential of social media for your business, request a personalized demo of Sprout Social today.

The post Randstad: A global staffing giant finds its social voice appeared first on Sprout Social.

“At Disobey, we believe in the power of authenticity, openness, & real connections. Whether it’s between the audience and brand, game, or publisher, creating those genuine relationships is key. That’s why we founded Disobey—to revolutionise how brands interact on social, making sure every fan feels seen and appreciated, turning them into engaged superfans.”, said Katja Schreiber, CEO at Disobey. “We steer clear of the bland, corporate approach. Instead, we focus on relatable, emotive content that speaks the language of the community, building trust through meaningful interactions. We take pride in setting higher standards in our industry & creating work that makes us & our clients proud.”

While Disobey has an ongoing “mission to shake up the gaming industry for the better,” they also need to show clients that its bold and unconventional approaches are indeed delivering quantifiable results. For this, Disobey relies on tools in the Sprout Social platform, which it uses to track social media content performance and manage communities effectively while monitoring competitors and conversations, and staying on top of trends.

Social moves fast, but we move even faster. We’re huge fans of Sprout’s Social Listening tool, and with it, we’re on top of the gaming industry 24/7. We’ve set up a variety of Listening topics to track gaming accounts—monitoring what they’re posting, how they’re reacting to trends and what conversations are sparking excitement. We also use this to track discussions around competing games and anything else we need to stay informed on. This way, we always stay ahead of the curve and know exactly what resonates with players at all times.

Kat Schrieber
CEO

Tracking and demonstrating the ROI of social media with Sprout’s Reporting

Disobey partners with some of the world’s biggest game publishers, developers and brands—including Square Enix, Humble Bundle and NVIDIA — to deliver impactful influencer campaigns and scroll-stopping social content that drives engagement and results. From open-world adventures and RPGs to sims and puzzles, Disobey crafts strategies that elevate brand presence, captivate audiences and fuel community growth.

Core to Disobey’s social media management services is the agency’s focus on blending paid social with organic content to help its clients foster online communities while building brand awareness to ensure their games get seen.

“We’ve championed the power of organic social since day one. At Disobey, we believe strong organic content is key to captivating players, driving them back into the game and reaching new audiences. We create superfans through strong community management and that’s another reason why we love Sprout—it helps us keep a pulse on our communities, fostering deep connections and turning casual scrollers into dedicated fans.” said Schreiber.

To date, the agency has created well over 10,000 social media posts and has sent nearly 100,000 messages through Sprout Social to engage the various communities they manage at scale. Disobey’s collaborations with over 2,000 influencers have generated more than 100 million impressions. And on social media overall, the agency’s work for its gaming clients has generated over 400 million organic impressions.

Although Disobey consistently delivers strong results, some gaming brands may struggle to recognize the immediate value of organic social media and community-building efforts, as ROI can be more challenging to measure on a day-to-day basis.

“We’re always refining our approach to help clients fully understand the unique advantages of social media and why it matters,” said Schreiber. “Many recognise the value, but it can sometimes be challenging to directly tie organic efforts to immediate financial metrics like sales. That’s where paid media makes it much clearer. On organic, our focus is on showing how long-term community and brand building creates sustainable growth, brand loyalty and deeper connections that ultimately drive results”.

When it comes to demonstrating ROI, Disobey benefits from the wealth of tools, like Reporting, that Sprout Social offers, which help the social team track and illustrate how and why their social media efforts are meeting clients’ goals. “Having solid data to back up your work and clearly show clients the impact you’re making is absolutely essential,” said Rachel Drever, Marketing Executive. “It helps that Sprout also presents the data in an easy, digestible way.”

Sprout’s reporting tools are incredibly powerful. I’m constantly diving into the data to see what’s working and what’s not, allowing us to tweak and optimise our content and community management strategies quickly. It’s all about staying agile and responsive to what the audience needs.

Rachel Drever
Marketing Executive

Focusing on accessibility and inclusiveness in community-building—with help from Sprout

Accessibility and inclusiveness are key to community-building success and thus are a significant focus for the social team at Disobey. “At Disobey, we’re leading the charge in building kind, inclusive communities that are accessible by default. This approach broadens our clients’ audience by reaching often-overlooked markets and reinforces their commitment to inclusivity for all community members. Accessible, inclusive content is at the heart of building strong connections with our communities,” said Drever. “This is a key focus for us, and our team values Sprout’s accessibility features, which help us ensure our content is inclusive for everyone. We consistently stay up to date with new tools and standardise these features across our work to guarantee accessibility.“

Schreiber and Drever agree that the social team at Disobey could not manage the thriving communities they build for gaming clients as efficiently as they do today without Sprout.

“As an agency managing many different clients across all major social media platforms and sending thousands of community messages every month, we heavily rely on Sprout Social to streamline our operations. It saves us time and enables us to consistently deliver the results our clients expect—all in one hub! Approvals are seamless, feedback is easy and the range of tools like Reporting and the Smart Inbox is a godsend. We absolutely love it,” said Drever.

“Without Sprout to efficiently filter inbound messages, we couldn’t support our communities day-to-day in the way we do. The Smart Inbox, Tagging and reporting tools are crucial to how we operate. Thanks to Sprout, we can build engaged communities, learn from our content and ultimately meet our clients’ goals more effectively.”

Sprout’s tagging capabilities are fantastic. This is not something you can do natively on platforms. So having that feature, whether it’s in the Smart Inbox or when publishing—like tagging before a post goes live or using the automated rules to help filter through the noise—is incredible. It really helps with reporting and I love it.

Rachel Drever
Marketing Executive

To find out how Sprout Social can support your agency’s efforts to help clients build engaged online communities and achieve social media ROI, request your free demo today.

The post Game on: How Disobey uses Sprout to help clients win at social media marketing that scores ROI appeared first on Sprout Social.

Before integrating Sprout Social, Papa Johns social media team struggled to manage multiple accounts and lacked a cohesive strategy to engage with its audience. “We were using another tool that was cumbersome and not user-friendly. We needed something that made our lives easier, not harder,” Josh shared.

Choosing Sprout Social

The choice of Sprout Social was a strategic one for Papa Johns. The platform’s comprehensive suite of social media management tools offered a solution to consolidate content planning, scheduling, and analytics. “The user experience of Sprout is great. It’s super easy to use, which I appreciate,” Josh emphasized.

Key features that made a difference included social media calendars, Smart Inbox, and social listening tools. These tools allowed Papa Johns to streamline their social media presence and focus on what really mattered: engaging with their audience.

Seeing transformative results

The impact of implementing Sprout Social was immediate and significant. Papa Johns saw a notable increase in engagement rates and a more efficient workflow. This transformation allowed the team to redirect their efforts towards creative and strategic initiatives. “We ran a campaign for our Cheesy Burger Pizza, which was the most requested pizza by our customers. Using Sprout, we listened to our audience and brought it back. The response was overwhelmingly positive,” Josh highlighted.

Real-time interaction capabilities and robust analytics empowered Papa Johns to monitor their campaigns’ effectiveness and make informed decisions based on data. “The insights gained through Sprout Social have empowered us to innovate our brand engagement approaches. A standout example of the power of Listening and Influencer Marketing for Papa Johns came through their collaboration with NFL player Jason Kelce. This partnership began unexpectedly when Kelce was seen enjoying Papa Johns in an Amazon documentary. “We discovered through social listening that Jason Kelce, an NFL player, was a fan of our pizza,” Josh noted. This organic connection led to a series of authentic marketing moments, strengthening the brand’s presence and resonating deeply with their audience. This experience underscores the significant impact of influencer marketing when it aligns genuinely with the brand’s values and customer interests.

Improving customer service

Another significant benefit of using Sprout Social was the enhancement of Papa Johns customer service. The Smart Inbox feature allowed the team to consolidate messages from various platforms into a single, manageable space. “Our care team can now quickly address customer inquiries and feedback, enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty,” Josh shared.” As a result of the Smart Inbox feature, response time has been cut in half since switching over to Sprout, as the team is able to move through the inbox much faster than before. The team is managing 600+ cases a week and saving 2 days worth of work each week—over 830 hours a year.”

The ability to promptly respond to customer concerns meant that Papa Johns could maintain high levels of customer satisfaction, an essential factor in building brand loyalty.

A stronger connection with the audience

By integrating Sprout Social into its social media strategy, Papa Johns has enjoyed numerous benefits. The business has streamlined operations and fostered a stronger connection with its audience. “Social listening is my favorite part of social media,” Josh stated. “You can find opportunities you would have never known about just by listening and paying attention.”

Papa Johns story is a testament to the potential of targeted social media tools in expanding brand influence and improving customer relationships. Since using Sprout Social, Papa Johns has not only enhanced their social media management but also increased their brand loyalty and engagement. Josh sums it up best, “The transformation has been incredible, and our ability to connect with our audience has never been stronger.”

To find out how your social media team can be more productive and deliver faster customer care, request your free demo of Sprout Social today.

The post Papa Johns cuts customer service response time in half with Sprout Social appeared first on Sprout Social.

By incorporating Sprout’s AI tools across our social media management workflows, we’ve been able to save time, secure resources and maintain the high-quality content our audience expects.

Here’s how we’re using AI in Sprout to optimize our workflows and improve results across the board.

Using AI Assist for alt text: Boosting accessibility with ease

For social teams, ensuring that content is accessible to everyone—including users who rely on screen readers—is a well known critical and routine part of publishing. But by using AI Assist in Compose, we’ve not only picked up the pace, we’ve completely streamlined the process of adding alt text to images.

Previously, writing alt text for every image added extra time to our workflows. Now, we simply drag and drop an image into Compose, and AI Assist generates alt text automatically. Of course, we still review the suggested text to ensure it accurately reflects the content (and advise you to do the same, your eyes matter), but the time saved is significant.

“We’ve found that AI-generated alt text is usually spot on, and if we ever need a different angle, the regenerate button gives us another option in seconds,” said Olivia Jepson, Senior Social Media Strategist at Sprout. “This has not only made our content more accessible but has also freed up time for more creative work.”

Making sense of social trends faster with AI insights

The sheer volume of data available to social media teams is both revolutionary and overwhelming. Sorting through that data to find actionable insights takes intention, and an incredible amount of time. At Sprout, we use AI Assist’s summarization capabilities to cut through the noise and find key trends with greater accuracy and speed.

“For weekly and monthly reporting, AI Assist in Sprout summarizes the data, helping us spot trends and identify areas needing attention faster than manual analysis ever could,” said Jepson. “It’s become a game changer for identifying spikes in sentiment, volume and engagement.”

Rather than combing through endless reports or messages, AI Assist in Listening helps us zero in on what’s important with just a few clicks. This allows our team to make more informed decisions, faster.

AI Assist in Compose: Breaking through creative blocks

Even the most creative social teams encounter writer’s block. When inspiration runs dry, Sprout’s AI Assist in Compose steps in to help generate ideas, captions, hashtags and more.

Whenever we feel stuck in a rut, we turn to AI Assist. All we need to do is input a few ideas or drop a link, and it suggests multiple captions with different tones. This means that if we’re onboarding a new employee or need someone who doesn’t publish regularly to pitch in with posting, we have a guard rail for keeping our brand voice consistent.

AI Assist helps us keep our workflows moving without sacrificing creativity, and we still get to keep it human. With the ability to generate copy in seconds, our team can focus on refining the message instead of struggling to start it.

Enhancing social customer care by responding with intention

Last but not least, good old community management, inbox monitoring, customer care. Managing customer inquiries on social media can often feel like a never-ending task. To make it more manageable, Sprout’s AI Assist in Social Customer Care helps us prioritize and respond more efficiently.

“Our social inbox is always buzzing with customer messages, and keeping up can be tough. But with AI-powered tools like Message Sentiment and Message Intent, we can quickly identify the tone and purpose of a message and respond appropriately,” said Greg Rokisky, Senior Social Media Strategist (Engagement). “This allows us to jump into high-priority conversations immediately, whether it’s a support issue or a chance to build brand love.”

Additionally, Enhance by AI Assist helps us tailor our responses, ensuring that each reply is on-point, whether we need to adjust the tone to be more friendly or professional.

AI Assist has transformed our approach to customer care—allowing us to respond faster and with clearer intent.

Greg Rokisky
Sr. Social Media Strategist (Engagement)

Even the A-team can benefit from AI

For our social team, AI isn’t just a buzzword—it’s an integral part of how we operate, helping us streamline workflows, unlock creativity and improve the customer experience. By incorporating our own product capabilities like AI Assist across various functions, we’ve been able to enhance everything that matters to us when it comes to social strategy.

Want to see these tools in action? Check out the videos embedded throughout this post and let us know how you’re using Sprout’s AI in your workflows on any social platform @SproutSocial. If you’re ready to test drive AI Assist for yourself, request a personalized demo today.

The post How Sprout optimizes social media workflows with AI appeared first on Sprout Social.

According to Acharee, it took them at least two days to manually collate and extract information from their social media campaigns. This meant they could only report monthly, making it difficult to establish informed key performance indicators (KPIs) or measure progress swiftly. Acharee knew that they needed to start making investments in their social media efforts.

“Social media has become more and more important as a channel as compared to before. We see social media as playing a key role in our business and how we communicate,” she said.

Manual reporting was acceptable in the early days when they had fewer hotels to manage. But with Minor Hotels growing significantly in the past few years, and real-time insights becoming even more important as the travel and tourism industry becomes more competitive, Acharee needed a solution that could keep up with the times. Specifically, a tool that would help them derive more insights from their campaigns more frequently and manage the growing number of social media accounts they handle.

The company started testing out various social media platforms to boost its online presence and measure its growth and performance. But ultimately, Acharee and her team decided to use Sprout Social in 2020—here’s why.

Social media content planning all in one place

For Acharee, one of the biggest draws of Sprout Social was its ability to streamline the company’s editorial operations. Sprout’s intuitive social media calendar allowed social media specialists to centralize their content, visualize and schedule their posts, and edit and track posts as needed.

Acharee also liked the collaborative aspect of Sprout. She’s able to see and review the social media calendars of various hotels and add notes directly. She can also pull up information on any account, at any time.

“In my role, I don’t just manage brand accounts, I also need to know how different regions or hotels are doing. So being able to have that visibility is critical,” Acharee said. “With Sprout, I can see which property I want to gather information about and review the specific goals and performance metrics for each.”

Sprout also enables social media managers to handle more accounts than before. According to Acharee, one social media specialist at Minor Hotels can now manage five to six accounts, which is about 10 to 12 social media profiles, when some could only manage two social media profiles before Sprout.

“City hotels like Anantara Siam Bangkok Hotel, which have around 16 social media channels, including Facebook and Instagram. So it’s almost impossible for our social media managers to manage the content natively. With Sprout, they can switch between profiles, schedule content, and pull reports from one place,” she said.

On-demand reporting, anytime, anywhere

Sprout’s reporting features allow businesses to parse through complex information and cut straight to the insights that can make a difference in their social media efforts. This is particularly useful for large organizations like Minor Hotels, which handles hundreds of brands, hotel chains and social media accounts.

“Every time we post content about a certain hotel, we add a Tag of the hotel code there. At the end of the month, we’re able to run a report and see how many times we mentioned a certain hotel and what other hotels might need more attention. So we’re able to allocate our social media resources more efficiently,” she said. “Before, we did this all by hand in Excel.”

Sprout’s competitor reports, in particular, have been useful to Acharee’s team. She said it allows them to “quickly understand our brand/page health, see how we are doing against our competitors, learn what works and what doesn’t, and then adapt our social media marketing strategy.”

Today, Acharee and her team have weekly or sometimes bi-weekly reporting meetings, which helps them monitor social media performance and inform business strategy. Sprout’s Listening tool allows them to identify top trends, topics and posts that are working for their competitors.

“To gauge how well we’re doing, we also need to understand how we stack up against our competitors. With Sprout’s reporting functions, we know where we stand,” Acharee said.

Because social media changes every day, we find the competitors we can pull directly from Sprout Social helps a lot. We can monitor timely social media trends, see what our competitors are doing and adjust our strategy accordingly.

Acharee Punyashthiti
Assistant Director, Social Media and Advertising

While these reports play a tactical role in Minor Hotel’s overarching strategy, the data gleaned from these reports contribute to the bigger picture of enticing consumers to choose Minor Hotels whenever they travel.

“Social media content, especially user-generated content, plays a very important role when clients or customers are planning a trip. So social media is very important for us in terms of inspiring people to book or share their experiences.”

Seamless integrations with existing software

Introducing new software into your existing operations—from training employees on the tool to integrating it into their daily workflows—is no easy task. Leaders also need to consider how new software will fit into their existing tech stack, and how that will impact their teams’ overall productivity.

This is why Sprout has multiple integrations with some of the most used software applications out there, including social media, business intelligence, lead generation and CRM, messaging, reputation and review management, social commerce, and more. This saves people from having to switch applications, needlessly downloading and uploading content, and changing up their workflows too much.

Because of Sprout’s multiple integration capabilities, Minor Hotels can streamline processes across the tools their team already uses regularly, including Canva, Google Analytics and Zendesk. The Zendesk integration in particular facilitates Minor Hotels’ ticketing system between the corporate office and various properties. Their customer contact center also uses this to respond to direct messages for Anantara and Avani brand accounts.

Sprout helps you work smarter, not harder

Acharee said that online presence plays an essential role in brand image and attracting customers for travel and tourism brands. She would recommend Sprout to other specialists who handle multiple social media channels. “Sprout will streamline your workflow to help you work smarter—not harder.”

To learn more about how Sprout can make your team more efficient and surface relevant insights faster, request a personalized demo today.

The post International hotel chain Minor Hotels uses Sprout to boost its online presence appeared first on Sprout Social.

Tuke, who is blind, long wanted to build a career in communications. And when she found that opportunity at RNIB, an organization she’d been involved with for years as a volunteer, she was excited to support her community in a new and impactful way. “I am proud to be a blind person, and I want to play a part in making the world more accessible for blind and partially sighted people,” she said. “That was a driving force for me to take on my role at RNIB.”

Despite her passion and commitment, Tuke said she started questioning her career choice because she found social media management—a core pillar of her job—so challenging. That’s because the technology tools she used for those tasks weren’t accessible enough for someone with sight loss. Tuke’s frustration inspired an extensive search by RNIB to find a platform that could be accessed by all users, leading to the adoption of Sprout Social, which Tuke calls “a game changer.”

Sprout Social is a social media management tool that is accessible—and it has quite literally transformed some of the key areas of my job.

Holly Tuke
Social Media Officer

Positive feedback about accessibility prompts RNIB to put Sprout to the test

RNIB’s social media team, which includes Head of Social Media Becky C. Brynolf, weren’t sure if the tool that Tuke needed even existed—but they were determined to try to find it. “We want Holly to be happy in her job and to feel motivated,” said Brynolf. “She has amazing skills and absolutely should have a career in communications. We just needed to find the right tool to make her work not feel like a slog.”

Tuke underscored the impact of accessible technology on her job satisfaction—and her ability to do her work effectively. “When a tool isn’t accessible, it means that blind and partially sighted people can’t do those tasks independently, or it completely takes away our chance to do them at all,” she explained. “In short, it diminishes our experiences.”

The search for an accessible social media management platform took many months. “We met with multiple providers,” she said. “We’d say, ‘We’re interested in your tool, but how accessible is it? We’d like to put it to the test.’”

That testing process was deflating at times, according to Tuke, but it was also educational. “We found social media management tools that aren’t accessible in the slightest, some that are somewhere in the middle, and some that tick all the boxes,” she said. “The range of accessibility we found made me reflect on my own experiences of working in communications as a blind person.”

Tuke said the arduous testing process is what confirmed that Sprout was the tool that could “change the game” for her as a blind social media professional. She first learned about Sprout through social media and noticed that many people were commenting positively about Sprout’s accessibility.

Tuke and Brynolf said that Sprout’s commitment to accessibility and the conversations they had with Sprout’s dedicated accessibility team further convinced them that they had found the right partner.

“Other providers didn’t offer all that Sprout did,” said Tuke. “That really stood out to us. It told us that Sprout’s beliefs about accessibility align with our own. They genuinely care. And we appreciated that the accessibility team at Sprout was very open to our candid feedback and suggestions.”

I want people to know that even if they don’t have a person with sight loss on their social media team right now, if they have Sprout, they will be ready for when that day comes. They will be set up to make people feel like they belong.

Becky C. Brynolf
Head of Social Media

Jumping on trends faster and exploring ways to expand RNIB’s reach—with help from Sprout

RNIB adopted Sprout in July 2023, it wasn’t long before their whole team started realizing benefits from using the platform—especially in terms of timesaving and productivity.

“I’m probably saving up to three hours of work per day because of Sprout,” said Tuke. “One reason is that I no longer have to navigate an inaccessible platform. But it’s also because Sprout makes things easier. In our previous platform, I couldn’t tag messages or hide or like comments. These are simple things, but being able to do them in one place saves loads of time.”

Brynolf noted that she’s a big fan of Sprout’s Reports, including profile, post and tag reporting. “So much of our work before Sprout was manual, and the tool we used for monthly reporting was nightmarish,” Brynolf explained. “Now, we can just nip into Sprout and ask things like, ‘Show me everything we’ve posted for the last two years arranged by highest engagement.’ It saves us time but also helps us spot themes and trends and be more proactive with our content.”

The competitor report that Brynolf pulls monthly from Sprout helps her team understand how their efforts on social media compare with those of other charities that focus on sight loss or eye health. She also uses that report to track organizations committed to social change that are “bold in their approach” with content. Brynolf said those insights from Sprout are helping her team to work with RNIB’s leadership on defining what “bold” means for the charity and the audiences it wants to reach.

Timesaving with Sprout allows RNIB’s social media team to focus more on work that can help support the charity’s core mission and raise its profile. That includes creating more engaging and proactive content for RNIB followers on Facebook, Instagram and other leading platforms, capturing more user-generated content and collaborating with influencers. They are also starting to experiment more with Listening in Sprout to identify opportunities to expand RNIB’s audience.

Both Brynolf and Tuke credit Sprout’s Smart Inbox and its filtering tools as a critical factor in their team’s ability to be more efficient and effective at community management. That is becoming even more important as they have seen RNIB’s inbound messaging volume grow in 2023 from about 1,000 to 2,000 messages per month to between 3,000 and 4,000. They attribute that rise partly to their team’s ability to react faster to emerging trends.

“Accessibility was obviously the top priority when we were evaluating Sprout and other platforms,” said Brynolf. “But when it comes to community management, we found that Sprout’s Smart Inbox was the best of the bunch.”

Now that we use Sprout, I can go to work every day and truly enjoy what I do because I have the accessibility, freedom and independence to perform my job in the same way as my sighted peers.

Holly Tuke
Social Media Officer

To learn how Sprout Social can help your organization with its community management while creating a more accessible workplace for your social media team, request your free demo today.

The post How the Royal National Institute of Blind People found a dedicated accessibility partner in Sprout appeared first on Sprout Social.

To continuously build on our strengths and identify areas for improvement in how we provide customer care and support, the team at Sprout turns to our own social media management platform for insight. In late 2022, following an analysis of an Inbox Activity Report, we saw a clear opportunity to decrease our average time to action during targeted customer support hours—from 6 p.m. to 8 a.m. CT.

“The Inbox Activity Report, which provides a holistic view of our team’s social care efforts, breaks down by the hour when our average time to action is highest and lowest,” explained Christina Nelson, Program Manager. “That helped us to identify the exact time periods when our response time was higher than we preferred. Sprout’s own reporting data indicated we had an opportunity to expand our after-hours social coverage. We also wanted to ensure we had a team trained to provide that personalized support.”

Our aim is to meet customers in the moment, wherever they’re at, and say, ‘here is what you need.’ We want our customers to feel heard and taken care of.

Christina Nelson
Program Manager, Customer Support

Strengthening the bridge between customer and social support to improve

Sprout’s social media team, which includes Social Media Strategist Greg Rokisky, first identified a need to enhance social support during the targeted customer support hours after reviewing the response rate for messages that arrived in Sprout’s Smart Inbox during that period. These messages included time-sensitive requests from our international customer base. “We realized there was an opportunity for the social team to partner with our customer support team to improve the response rate,” said Rokisky.

Our customer support agents who work during the targeted customer support hours are located primarily in the Asia-Pacific and Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) regions. Their core responsibilities include addressing customer requests for technical support and basic product education via email, live chat and the phone. Nelson said the team would always strive to address social support requests during their busy shifts, but it wasn’t easy to find the time given all of their other priorities.

An analysis of the Inbox Activity Report also showed that agents replying to social messages during the target hours weren’t always tagging those messages in a consistent way. Rokisky said that made it challenging for the social team to organize, track and use those messages in their reporting later and uncover opportunities to deepen relationships with our customers. Rokisky and his team sought to alleviate this issue by providing the agents with more guidance on best practices for tagging.

“We recognized that strengthening the bridge between customer support and social support could help us all to deliver the ‘trifecta’ of social customer care effectively,” said Rokisky. “When we can provide personalized, timely care and meet customers where they’re at, it helps turn our customers into brand advocates. That’s powerful, and it helps Sprout maintain our solid reputation.”

The insights we gained from Sprout’s Inbox Activity Report allowed us to pinpoint precise gaps in our social support. That allowed us to take a targeted approach to improvement that required minimal effort—but delivered dramatic results.

Greg Rokisky
Social Media Strategist

Using data insights to create a new staffing strategy for handling social support requests

With their key objectives in focus—decreasing response times, increasing the tag rate, and smoothing the handoff of customer messages between customer support and social support—the social team, customer support team and social leadership at Sprout brainstormed strategies to achieve those goals.

They decided to pilot a “tiger team”—a group of tenured customer support agents already working for Sprout during the targeted customer support hours who could pivot to social support requests at select intervals during their regular shifts. Nelson said they used insights from the Inbox Activity Report to create a staffing strategy for the team, identifying the best times for agents to go into Sprout’s Smart Inbox and handle requests for social support.

Each agent on the tiger team now dedicates a percentage of their regular shift to managing social support messages. They also communicate expectations for agents handling those requests, including specific instructions for managing tags.

Setting those expectations and establishing centralized ownership for social support led to quick and dramatic results. For example, Sprout saw a 37% increase in our tag rate from December to March 2023. We also saw a decrease of up to 55% in the average time to action during some periods we were targeting for improvement. “We were able to hit these metrics despite some of the tiger team agents being new to providing support on social,” Nelson noted.

Rokisky and Nelson both pointed to how easy it was for the agents to learn to use Sprout’s Smart Inbox, and they cited it as a top factor for the impressive results achieved during the pilot. “We provided basic training to the agents before they took on their own shifts,” said Rokisky. “We spent about 30 to 45 minutes going over potential issues they might encounter and shadowing them as they went through messages in the inbox. That’s all they needed to get going. It was beautiful.”

Automated rules in the Smart Inbox, like closing out new follower notifications, also helps the customer support agents focus on the messages that matter most. “The agents can devote their attention to questions that require them to dig a little deeper and spend more time helping our customers, instead of getting bogged down answering numerous, easy questions,” said Nelson.

Consistent tagging generates more insights and stronger reporting

Based on the tiger team’s success, Sprout’s social and customer support teams are formalizing the pilot program into a permanent process. They are also continuing to track average time to action metrics to identify where and when they may need to consider expanding social support coverage further.

The teams have also been working closely with Sprout’s Professional Services staff to identify more ways to deliver outstanding, consistent support to our customers worldwide, at any time. One result of that collaboration is a saved replies repository that the agents can use to customize responses to social support requests.

Sprout’s Smart Inbox is an invaluable tool for our customer support team. It provides one shared space where we can see everything that is coming in, what has been completed and what still needs to be done. That visibility reduces the need for us to ask anyone to hop on a call after their work hours to get everyone up to speed.

Christina Nelson
Program Manager, Customer Support

Another positive outcome of the pilot program was the opportunity to conduct a thorough tag audit. “We created and documented a shareable tagging infrastructure,” Rokisky said. “And now that we have agents providing consistent tagging around the clock, we can pull more comprehensive insights that can prove ROI to our leadership. That, in turn, is helping us to listen to our customers more effectively and respond to their needs more proactively.”

Rokisky and Nelson also noted that the success of the pilot program speaks to all the work their teams have done, in general, over the past several years to improve workflows, training, guidelines and more, as part of Sprout’s ongoing efforts to provide the swift, high-quality support that our customers around the world expect.

Find out how insights from Sprout Social can help your business deliver standout care and support to your customers at any hour, wherever they’re located, by requesting a free demo today.

The post How Sprout improved its global social customer care with its own insights appeared first on Sprout Social.

Social media engagement is an essential piece of the Dreamforce experience and integral to Salesforce’s customer relationships year-round. So, in 2022, Salesforce made the enterprise-wide transition to a new social media management platform. The move to Sprout Social has paid off, according to Mikaely Quaranta, Senior Manager, Social Media Strategy, for the customer relationship management (CRM) software company.

“Sprout is such an intuitive platform,” Quaranta said. “Our social media practitioners were excited to jump onto Sprout and start using the Reports and Listening features right away. We were also confident going into Dreamforce because we knew that Sprout’s automation and workflow features would allow us to move at the speed of social during our biggest event of the year.”

Tracking trends and securing real-time approvals on the go

Marissa Kraines, Vice President and Global Head of Social Media at Salesforce, said social media plays an integral role in helping the company build excitement for Dreamforce.

“We want to bring the magic and conversation of Dreamforce to all our audiences on social media,” she explained. “First, we’re looking for ways to amplify the in-person experience through content and interactions across our social media channels. Second, we’re determining how to translate the nuances of the on-site event to the virtual and on-demand experiences.”

With Sprout, Kraines and her team can easily track mentions from conference attendees and other interested parties, including the media, as well as keep tabs on announcements happening online and offline during the event.

Social listening is especially important during events like Dreamforce. Sprout allows us to understand when our audience is online, when they want us to engage with them and how we can assist them throughout their conference experience. Sprout also helps us stay on top of trends and be more strategic with our planning.

Mikaely Quaranta
Senior Manager, Social Media Strategy

Sprout’s mobile app also quickly emerged as a crucial time-saving tool for the social team, according to Kraines. She said it helps them to get approvals from stakeholders for content and messaging “in real time—easily and concisely,” whether they’re running around at events or on the Salesforce campus.

Forging and fortifying one-to-one relationships with Salesforce’s greatest champions

Sprout’s reporting helps Salesforce stay close to what drives their audience engagement. “It’s so important to measure engagement to ensure we continue creating content our audience loves,” said Max Benesi, Salesforce’s Associate Manager, Social Media and Community. “With Sprout, we can do that quickly—reporting out at any time so we always know where things stand.”

Through social listening, analytics and other features in the Sprout platform, like Sprout’s Smart Inbox, Saleforce’s social media team is learning even more about the Trailblazer community, and how to engage with them effectively via the company’s 150+ social channels.

“We’ve learned that the best way to build relationships with our Trailblazers is through one-on-one engagements on social—and Sprout’s Smart Inbox helps us to accomplish that,” said Benesi.

Salesforce’s Trailblazers and other highly engaged social audience members are open to having Benesi and his team test-drive new content with them. “They’re very honest—they will tell us what they like and don’t like,” Benesi said. “We use their feedback to inform our content creation.”

With other social media management platforms that we’ve used, the reporting was not intuitive. We often had to pull reports natively and work with spreadsheets. When our team started using Sprout, all that manual work went away.

Max Benesi
Associate Manager, Social Media and Community

Accelerating speed to insights—and eliminating thousands of hours of manual work

The business intelligence Salesforce gains from using Sprout helps them evolve their marketing strategies far beyond specific events. “We can’t just make decisions on a hunch. We need accurate data to understand where we’re finding success,” said Kraines. “The insights we get from Sprout allow us to have confidence in our decision-making.”

Quaranta underscored further just how game-changing Sprout’s reporting capabilities have been for the social media practitioners at Salesforce. “We saw immediate value following our implementation,” she said. “We’re reporting faster, and in real time, and sharing information continuously with our stakeholders.”

She added, “We’re also moving 10 times faster per day with community management by using Sprout’s automation and workflows. That gives our team more time to focus on strategy and bring our creative vision to life—the things that we do best.”

“When my team is able to automate simple tasks, it enables them to take that bandwidth and focus it toward innovation,” said Kraines. “We’ve saved over 12,000 hours this year by using Sprout, and our team is having a lot more fun with their work.”

Making plans to leverage a 360-degree view of Salesforce’s social media audience

Kraines underscored that while Sprout is a valuable tool for tracking social media around events like Dreamforce, her team uses Sprout’s capabilities to help them deliver on their year-round mission to increase brand awareness. That means helping customers truly understand what the global CRM software and applications provider does, and how it impacts their businesses—as well as their customers.

“Salesforce is focused on helping businesses become ‘customer companies,’” said Kraines. “We provide them with a 360-degree view of their customers so they can bring those ‘wow’ moments to life. I believe that social is the bread and butter of delivering that 360-degree view of the customer.”

Looking ahead, Kraines said her team is eager to see what impact Sprout Social’s integration with Salesforce will have on how they craft social strategies and create new campaigns. “Sprout has already made it easier for the Salesforce social team to share insights with our leadership about what our customers are talking about, and what their needs and issues are,” she said. “This information helps to shape our company’s marketing, sales and operational strategies. And now, with Sprout’s integration across our platform, we can bring social insights and data everywhere across Salesforce.”

Kraines said her team is confident that Sprout is the right partner to help support Salesforce’s growing social media practice. “Sprout has great products,” she said. “But more importantly, they’re evolving and scaling along with our team. By partnering with us and listening to our input, Sprout allows us to be at the forefront of social media.”

I recommend Sprout to other social leaders because they have been such an amazing partner. When you’re onboarding a critical component of your Martech stack, it’s so important to have people alongside you who want to see you succeed.

Marissa Kraines
Vice President, Global Head of Social Media

To find out how your social media team can be more productive, free up time for innovation and never miss a moment to engage meaningfully with customers, request your free demo of Sprout Social today.

The post Salesforce’s social media team saves 12,000 hours in first year using Sprout Social appeared first on Sprout Social.