Brands are still lacking when it comes to customer service within social channels, with new data from Sprout Social revealing five in six customer messages that require responses are not being addressed by brands.
The Sprout Social Index shows that overall inbound message volume has climbed 77 percent in the last year, which suggests a shift in how consumers are using social media. In fact, the data found a 100 percent increase in messages to brands that require a response in the last 12 months. And even though there has been a 5 percent improvement in response time since Q2 2013, the data also shows that there has been a 4.6 percent decrease in response rate.
To help brands excel in their social customer service initiatives, Sprout Social has developed a new suite of features. These features aim to assist businesses in finding and engaging with the social messages that matter most.
For example, Sprout Social's new smart inbox enables brands to manage messages, visualize real-time progress, find the messages they need to respond to and identify where they left off replying. Moreover, Sprout Social's new tasking feature enables users to assign messages to the appropriate team members, while the platform's collision detector feature notifies team members in real-time when another team member is already responding to a message to avoid duplicate responses. Sprout Social is also providing brands with conversation history every time a team member hits reply, which enables teams to respond to customer messages both quickly and personally.
"The new Smart Inbox is built around two concepts," states a Sprout Social blog post. "First, visibility into your message volume and activity enables you to more effectively and efficiently communicate with your customers. Second, you need tools that enable you to not only be more effective and organized today, but that are flexible enough to support your social strategy as it evolves."