Sparkcentral was a social customer care solution and cloud-based customer engagement platform that catered specifically to customer care teams within large enterprises, enabling them to deliver real-time social customer service. Sparkcentral was acquired by Hootsuite in January 2021. The product has since been discontinued.
N/A
Verint Channel Automation
Score 8.0 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Verint Channel Automation is a social customer service software that enables companies to engage in large volumes of social media conversations with their customers. The cloud-based software combines intelligent prioritization with team management workflows.
Sparkcentral has an extremely dedicated customer service team The platform UX is brilliant Reports are very detailed & easy to export The system is stable more than 98% of the time Queue management is extremely easy They need to work on a mobile app / making the website mobile friendly The ability to add more social media channels is essential
From experience, you may ask the Conversocial team to make recommendations on licenses for larger vs. smaller social customer service teams. The need for support and the amount of usage you may get from the tool's robust offering may differ as a result of those precedents. The tool is adaptable in both scenarios it would seem.
The biggest advantage of the Sparkcentral platform is its "inbox zero" philosophy. With this, our customer support requests are queued within the app, and agents need to work down the queue to keep it empty.
The app is designed from the ground up for customer care - instead of taking a generic social platform, and sprinkling in some customer care tools. Everything about Sparkcental is designed for helping our customers.
Sparkcentral allows us to do much better CRM. We can make customer notes, see recent interactions, determine who helped the customer (and when).
Previous conversations: This is one of the main reasons why I personally love Conversocial over Hootsuite and other social media engagement tools. Conversocial pulls in all previous interactions we've had with community members and it helps us identify if we've already addressed their problem, if they are a detractor/advocate, and so much more. With other engagement tools, it's frustrating as a community member may repost the same thing over and over again, but at different time periods. If you're unable to see what someone has said in the past, we may waste our time replying to the same thing multiple times, or we also risk responding with the same general advice, when we could try a different approach.
Tags and filters: Conversocials use of tags and filters are extremely simple to use. They have shortcuts which help you easily assign a tag to an item and then you can easily pull up each of those tags within Conversocial itself or your can open up an external report. If my team is in a hurry and wants to quickly see a certain tag, we can use the filter option and within seconds we have all the information we need.
Simple shortcuts: Conversocial has several shortcuts that save my team a lot of time. One single button on my keyboard can apply sentiment and archive something so it's out of my way. I can also use shortcuts to apply a tag, assign an item, and do other tasks. It may seem like a small benefit but each second saved really adds up throughout each day and week.
Communication: As we know, technology has issues and every tech issue Conversocial has experiences has been handled extremely well. I've never encountered any issues contacting Conversocial, we're always notified when they are working on a solution and once the problem has been fixed. We also receive random pop-ups within Conversocial to notify us of known issues before our team experiences them, and when there is a new feature that we should be aware of. Their communication is always on point and it's great to know that we can always rely on them.
In the beginning our team had the option to see what another user was typing as they responded to a post. With the latest update, this was taken away. That feature was key for us to shadow agents remotely who are still in training to provide real time feedback.
Our company has a number of different brands that we manage. Having a truly unified queue would be a great addition for us!
The bulk resolve should allow the option to select on the posts that you wish to resolve instead of selecting a time frame for bulk resolve. Often we find that marketing posts generate more volume in the evening. However, there are sometimes posts where the customer needs assistance during that time. So, if we were to bulk resolve for a certain number of evening hours we would potentially miss a customer's concern through that option as it is currently. But, if the option was to go through and select on all marketing posts and then bulk resolve you would ensure that you are not missing a post where a customer needs assistance.
I would like to see an improvement in the reporting dashboard which is something I mentioned to Josh (the CEO) on a call back in April. He said that it is something they are working on but to remember that this is truly a customer service social media platform so some of the features that I would like to see may not fit well with the users of the product.
Sparkcentral has never given us a good reason to consider any other option. Aside from all the positive points I mentioned in previous areas of this review, something else that has really impressed us is their customer service (makes sense, they're a customer service company after all!). Any time we have a question or concern, we send them an email and we get a response almost instantly.
The only two reasons we would not continue using Conversocial are it's lack of comprehensive analytics and its lack of Radian6's categorization tools. Tags make up for the categorization pretty well, however, and we're considering switching everything over to this now that we've tested tags for a couple months within Conversocial. (I previously wrote that Conversocial lacks support for some social channels like Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube, but they have now added Instagram and YouTube.)
Because of the number of features it offers and the manner in which they're presented. I've explored a number of other tools that just don't do it as well. When sorting through and responding to hundreds of social media messages each day, the number of clicks it takes to do something really matters. Conversocial does a great job of minimizing clicks and presenting the data we need without having to click to find it
Our account rep at Conversocial has set up a call with me every two weeks to check in, talk about new features, or answer questions. I know I can email or call her for help anytime. Their support team also responds quickly.
Comprehensive training in all aspects of the software and general usages (including social media) for both agents and managers. Simulation workshops really made the live deployment process very smooth.
Sparkcentral does what it has offered to do, where other software made empty promises, Sparkcentral delivers. They also inform us, anytime they are undergoing maintenance or when Twitter or Facebook has an API change, where in previous cases we would have to discover this ourselves.
Early on we did comparisons with Hootsuite and later with Adobe. While they have similarities, the difference at the time and likely currently, was the personal interest and general accessibility of Conversocial's platform and people. The combination of an effective CRM solution and a team that was readily available to help proved to be the winning formula for our business.
One of the biggest benefits we are seeing is that we have reduced the number of post-holiday complaints coming into head office. Since we are responding to issues and concerns as they arise, we can impact overall customer satisfaction.
The efficiencies gained from using a centralized platform for managing the response process has enabled us to reduce our team by 50%.
We can track that we are responding to a fan's first message within 30 minutes.
We can track the number of messages each user engages with.
We can see the most effective times of day to post and reply.
