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Sparkcentral (discontinued)

Score10 out of 10

27 Reviews and Ratings

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What is Sparkcentral (discontinued)?

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.

Categories & Use Cases

Reviews

What users are saying about Sparkcentral (discontinued).
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The go to platform for brilliant customer service

Incentivized
Islam FarragView profile
Social Media Manager in Social Media at noon (10,001+ employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We used Sparkcentral to engage & reply to customers' enquires, Sparkcentral helped us a lot in reducing the first response time, the automation feature & the ability to automatically remove all the unwanted interactions from the queue got us more productive & we were able to focus more on our customer's inquiries. the reports are very detailed as well.

Pros

  • Customer Service response time is brilliant
  • Reports are extremly detailed
  • Queue management & the interface of the platform is very user friendly

Cons

  • Allowing users to connect more social media platforms
  • Having a mobile app is extremly essential as the website is not mobile friendly

Return on Investment

  • Better customer service
  • Improved first response time
  • Better average handling time for the agents

Alternatives Considered

Falcon.io

Other Software Used

Falcon.io

Usability

Sparkcentral Review

Incentivized
Michael ChorleyView profile
Digital Analyst in Customer Service at Direct Energy (5001-10,000 employees employees)

Pros

  • Sparkcentral provides great customer support.
  • Love the user feed.
  • Knowledge Base.

Cons

  • Better Reporting.
  • More targeted insights.
  • Developing specific user profiles as to give Sparkcentral users-targeted insights regarding customer interaction.

Return on Investment

  • Pulled-in customer interactions so that we may fix problems in real-time, increase CSAT scores and therefore improving overall customer satisfaction.

Alternatives Considered

Spredfast Conversations

Other Software Used

Adobe Analytics, Hootsuite Free

Delightfully Satisfied

Incentivized
Tukio MachiniView profile
Social Media Engagement Assistant in Social Media at TwinBear Management (1-10 employees employees)

Pros

  • Allows for automated tagging, while also giving the option to disregard these.
  • Customer service is very responsive, personable and helpful.
  • Allows for users to respond completely within the platform, making work load more efficient.

Cons

  • The biggest con I found while using Sparkcentral, has since been resolved. Which was that it wasn't able to do retroactive bulk resolving.

Return on Investment

  • Cases are being handled quicker and more efficiently which allows agents to move on to other things -- a positive from any angle.
  • Pending has allowed for us to confirm that all customers have been followed up with, something that was previously done manually.
  • Reporting features gives clients a new insight to customer outreach.

Other Software Used

Meltwater Buzz Unpublished

Sparkcentral is the best! If you want a easy to use tool to manage social media, choose them!

Incentivized
Melinda CoxView profile
Digital Care Specialist in Social Media at Direct Energy (1-10 employees employees)

Pros

  • Love the tabs for each brand our company manages on social media. We manage several so it keeps things nice and neat.
  • Love the easy to use layout.
  • Love the boomerang feature. It is helpful when we need to follow up on something since it will come back in our feed at whatever time we set as a reminder, so we don't forget about it.

Cons

  • Bringing back the option to see not only who is responding to a customers post, but actually seeing the response as they are typing it out. That was a neat feature to have.
  • It will timeout, which is a bit annoying sometimes but not a huge deal.

Return on Investment

  • Customers appreciate fast responses to the things they post on social media. This tool allows that to happen.
  • The dashboard allows us to keep up with how many are waiting in our queue so we can keep up with how busy we are during the day and manage it.
  • Customer satisfaction has seemed to increase while using this tool.
  • Being able to add notes with the customers address and phone info is awesome as well.

Sparkcentral is the smart choice

Incentivized
Eden WallaceView profile
Manager of Customer Chat and Social Media in Social Media at Direct Energy (5001-10,000 employees employees)

Pros

  • Sparkcentral makes it incredibly easy to manage queues, and assist repeat customers without losing any efficiency in the conversation. Agents are able to see a constant flow of the conversation so they are able to better respond and assist the customers.
  • Agents are able to set up reminders so they can better follow up with customers. This allows them to either ensure resolution was achieved as expected, or surprise and delight the customer with a follow up several weeks or months out.
  • The workflow is one of the greatest features of Spark. It allows you to avoid agent collisions by pushing conversations to the next available agent versus agents choosing them and potentially responding twice. Agents are also able to see when a co-worker is working on a post and can move on to the next or assist if needed.

Cons

  • The only drawback for my group with Sparkcentral is the lack of a unified queue. We manage 19 different social pages and counting, and are unable to see all of the traffic in one location. Agents having to go between 19+ pages to check for content can make it less efficient on time.

Return on Investment

  • We are new to the Sparkcentral family and are anxiously awaiting results on how it impacts our efficiencies and overall brand reputation online.

Other Software Used

Salesforce Analytics Cloud, Velaro Live Chat, Spredfast Conversations

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