2. Scale your customer service efforts with ease

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Start by brainstorming the different messages you receive on a given day, including categories like product feedback, complaints, billing issues, service questions and sales leads. From there, create and apply dedicated tags to organize your inbound messages by subject matter.

A Facebook complaint about a lost order instagram data or a question about billing issues, for example, is going to require a different response than a comment celebrating a recent product launch—you’d probably tag the former as “complaint” and the latter as “positive customer feedback”. With Tags, customer service teams can quickly sort incoming Cases accordingly and identify which ones need immediate attention.

Sprout's Smart Inbox with an overlay for Tags for several message categories including Tier 1 Support, Tier 2 Support, Sales Lead and Service Issues.
Tags are equally valuable for managing an acute spike in inbound messages following situations like a product recall or service outage. With Sprout’s Advanced Plan, team members can set up automated rules to tag inbound messages containing certain keywords or phrases to a relevant category or agent. This removes the need to manually Tag messages and gives customer service representatives more time to focus on resolving the issue at hand.

As consumers continue to communicate with brands on social media, customer support leaders will need to evaluate if they need to hire more service agents. But proving the need for more team members can be a challenge without providing the reasoning behind it.

Data and insights like the ones offered by Sprout’s Inbox Team Report help you determine the right time to hire. Here, you can see the total number of messages assigned to each of your team members, average first reply time and average reply wait times for messages.

An example of Sprout's Inbox Team Report includes a summary of team performance and shows several metrics including average first reply time, average reply wait time and total replies.