Social Customer Care

“You can do that through social?!?”I can't count the number of times I've heard this during my career in Social Media Customer Care. My answer is always the same: Not only can we provide top-tier technical support on social, but we do it better by meeting customers exactly where they are.I see too many brands pushing customers “offline,” creating a splintered experience. When you combine Sprout’s Case Management feature with Custom & Case Management Reports, you can do just as much, if not more, without ever leaving the platform.Getting off my soapbox now 🤣 I’d love to hear from this group—are you keeping your customer care 100% on social, or do you still find yourselves having to move people to other platforms? 

I know that Trellis was recently updated, but our team/enterprise uses Claude. Is there any future plans to add this as an integration option? 

Macros: I have been trying to use macros on Sprout Social but I can’t comprehend what they are used for exactly and how they can be helpful in my daily job as a community Manager with limited access to some features.Notes: I have been writing notes in the notes area but I haven’t been exactly able to see my notes again when I click on the profile or the the messages’ thread and I don’t know exactly how my other team members can see the note(s).Profiles: Could you please advise on the best way to manage recurring mentions and frequent comments from unrelated Instagram accounts, specifically how to stop them from tagging us or how to handle one user who comments on every post? 

I’m in the healthcare industry and I want to improve the way I write comments and replies on LinkedIn and Facebook. I feel like my replies are repetitive, and I’d love advice on how to improve that or work on that, also how do you keep replies on Facebook and LinkedIn sounding natural instead of templated?

Does anyone know whether it would be considered a HIPAA violation if a previous patient or a potential patient responds to a social media post by requesting a link via direct message (DM)? For example, if a post says, "DM us for the link," could a patient's public comment or response create any HIPAA compliance concerns?

I want to see if there were a list of questions for each category before applying. This would inform what type of campaign/project I would be talking about and which individuals are part of my team. We have many social campaigns with different lines of businesses so it would be super helpful to know those details first. 

For those of you who have launched an employee advocacy program, can you share some of the successes and struggles you had in getting team members on board? We’d love to start one but resources (platform costs and staffing) are concerns.

We launched a new product and there’s been some challenges, so it’s no surprise we’re seeing comments about it on our social media posts (often ones that are unrelated to the product). Usually I have pretty good luck asking them to take the conversation to DM so I can get their email and other private contact info so I can have our customer success team reach out. But recently, people just want to keep complaining in public and try to give me that information on comments.One hypothesis I have is that they don’t know what a DM is, so I’ve changed to saying direct message. But wondering if maybe that’s too confusing. Anyone have experience and thoughts on this? 

I’d love a feature where we can see all of the posts we’re tagged/mentioned in across all platforms under one tab so we don’t have to go to the individual channels anymore!

Hi Social Care Champions! I see so many great tips here, and I want to add something about Case Management. We offer social care as a service at B Squared Media (8 years and running with this service!). I CANNOT EXPRESS how much of a GAME CHANGER Case Management is for all things social care. WOW! Our clients are SO impressed.Escalations are much more seamless to handle … automatic case creation is **chef’s kiss** … TAGGING IS LIFE! I’ll stop gushing now. But seriously, if you’re doing any sort of customer care/customer service/social selling - YOU NEED THIS. 💚

🪿 At Goosechase, we’re always looking for the best way to drive traffic to our blog and other resources from our social channels. This has evolved over time, from the link in bio to the automated DM - think “comment LESSON, and we’ll DM you the free lesson plan!”💭 What tools do you use to automate your Instagram DMs?  🤖 Stan, Manychat, or is there a feature in Sprout that can provide the same service? Or do you connect your customers to your content in a totally different way? Did I already miss the auto-DM train? 🚂  🙏 Thanks for your help!

Anyone else out there responsible for moderating your performance marketing on Facebook or Instagram (i.e. not your organic posts, reels etc, but your paid content)? What is your strategy to moderating comments and responding to potential shoppers with genuine inquiries? Do you see improved performance based on how you treat your ad’s comment section? I would love to connect further. 

Hi all! I manage an instagram account for a large public university’s study abroad office. While our instagram account does well in terms of collecting likes on posts, our comment section is full of crickets. Can anyone chip in on tactics they use to grow a healthly comment section? One that’s engaging to students, encouraging further discussion, while keeping it drama-free 😅 I know there will always be clean-up to do for inflammatory comments, but I’m wondering how you transform quiet lurkers to converation-makers, without inviting too many trolls! I’d like to create a supportive community of students who can chat together on our posts. Very appreciative of any ideas you can share!

Trying to figure out how to bill a large hospital system that wants us to do social monitoring and response on nights and weekends from 5 pm to 11 pm and all day on weekends.

Hi all! We’re in desperate need of some advice/help. At the end of December, we were notified our Facebook Ad Account was suddenly disabled after ‘unusual activity was discovered’. I’ve had an active ticket open on this with Meta for weeks with no updates/help beyond an occasional ‘we’ve escalated this to a specialized team’ whenever I ask for updates. We managed to get on a call with a Meta rep who told us when he spoke with the Support team, they said we needed to supply ‘further information’ to them but provided no specifics on what information was needed - then he ghosted us too. And this is the hamster wheel we’ve been on the past few weeks; nothing really gets us anywhere! So, we’re coming to the community hoping someone has faced a similar experience and can help us. One question we have is: What information does Meta require to get a disabled account back? We’ve sent invoices/proof of payment, driver’s licenses – but Meta keeps telling us they need “information” to resolve this

Is anyone willing to share account strategy criteria or resources you have used when advising organizations, with multiple social media accounts, on the same social channel?  My counsel has always been that for each account to exist, there needs to be a differentiated audience, as well as enough people hours devoted to quality content creation, community management and customer support. I would like to have some additional information to share with stakeholders when these conversations arise. Thank you! 

Greetings and Happy New Year, Arboretum! My team and I are planning to set up the customer feedback survey in Sprout. We are planning a smaller pilot phase to start. Before we begin, I want to gather some benchmarks against which we can measure our own survey results, which will allow us to set goals and expectations on CSAT scores that are specific to social media customer care.For context, we are intending to ask these questions:How satisfied are you with the help you received from me today?   Was your question or issue resolved? Please tell us more about your experience.For those teams out there providing customer care through social, what industry are you in, and what are your average CSAT scores? 

Responding with empathy and clarity goes a long way, even if you may not necessarily agree with the customer. It’s important to acknowledge their experience and show that you're genuinely listening to their concern. Even when faced with complaints or negative feedback, turning the situation into a positive experience can help build loyaltyFor example, I once dealt with a customer who hadn’t received their payment for an influencer partnership. Although we hadn’t found any previous messages from them, they claimed to have reached out multiple times and posted negative comments about the company on Twitter. When I saw their public complaints, I took a moment to empathize with their frustration instead of responding with a generic reply. (Note: I think response templates are incredibly helpful, but sometimes a more thoughtful response is necessary.) I acknowledged their concern, apologized for the inconvenience, and assured them we were actively working to resolve the issue. I followed up

One way to help ensure you know what to do in most situations, ensure consistent response, and reduce many stresses and headaches is to create a comprehensive social media playbook. A playbook can include, for example, best practices, response templates, and escalation procedures, as well as specific guidance for specific clients or campaigns. An ounce of prevention can really add up to a pound of cure!

One thing we’ve found super helpful is setting up tags for common types of responses while monitoring the inbox. These can be broad, like “Negative - Low” or “Post Response,” or more specific, like tagging different product types our client offers.It’s been a total lifesaver! When a client asks for all comments about a specific topic, we can quickly sort by tag, export the data, and send it over—super easy.If you’re looking for ways to stay organized and save time, this is definitely something to think about for the new year!

While authenticity and personalizing in social media is important, so is the personalization in how to relate with customers. Use the contact person’s name, be quick with replies, know their history and engage in genuine and meaningful conversations beyond just transactional conversations. This makes a difference in customer relationships.

I am a social team of one so it’s sometimes hard to respond to every comment or message in a timely manner but a couple of things that have helped me are the automations you can set up within Meta for messages and the saved reply feature in Sprout. The Meta automations are a great feature for giving immediate responses to followers and providing them with a way to find their answer or contact us. The saved reply feature in Sprout also saves me a lot of time when responding to common questions. Does anyone else have any favorite tools or features they use for customer care?

Customer care is such an interesting aspect of this job! For me, one of the biggest challenges is that I own the socials for a variety of brands, with many different product managers. Because of this, it can be tough to chase down the relevant information in a timely manner! Throughout my time in the role, I’ve learned a TON about each product and portfolio so that I’m able to answer as many questions as possible myself. My top tip would be to record the questions you’ve received and the answers you’ve given so that when you’re asked a duplicate question, you have the answer ready to go. This way, you can also create response templates for your most commonly asked questions!

Working in recruitment marketing for a large company can make it hard to keep track of every little detail of every department. Creating a FAQ/department guide has been super helpful to quickly and accurately answer comments and DMs! Having a list of who to reach out to about specific topics is also helpful- you’re always going to get niche questions that have never come up before and can only be answered by 1 person! Even though we have the guide, we still make sure to personalize responses to the individual and not copy/paste every answer. It helps show that you actually care about the comment and aren’t just a robot.

I work at a university and we’ve begun getting kind of spammy comments across a number of our affiliated LinkedIn pages from people naming a supposed alum who they are accusing of fraudulent behavior. I’ve done a number of searches both internally and externally to try to connect this person to the person of the same name that graduated from our school AND to the companies they’re namedropping as being frauds and I cannot definitely do so. I can’t decide if we should delete these comments that have nothing to do with anything or leave them be with no comment. I don’t feel like I can comment because I can’t confirm who or what they’re talking about. I’d love to hear what others might do in this situation because on the one hand we want these commenters to feel comfortable engaging with us but we also don’t want their possible misinformation to affect our other customers.